Why is Berlin such an international flight provincial backwater?
For a major European capital city, Berlin has very few international nonstop flights. Long-haul flights to and from other continents are a rarity in Berlin, Germany’s largest city by far. (The Berlin metro region has 6,144,600 people [2019], more than any other German city, including Frankfurt and Munich.) Even before the Covid-19 pandemic brought a sudden halt to international and domestic flying, anyone trying to get to Berlin by air from North America, Asia, Africa, or many other places had to fly via Frankfurt (FRA), Munich (MUC), London (LHR), Amsterdam (AMS), or some other European airport in order to land in Berlin. Business people in Berlin who wanted to quickly reach international destinations via a nonstop flight were (and still are) forced to first fly to another hub airport to board a nonstop international flight.
Berlin Brandenburg Airport – Terminal 1 interior in November 2020. PHOTO: Arne Müseler (Wikimedia Commons)
No other European capital city has so few long-haul flights. Before BER opened to air passengers in November 2020, amidst the worst downturn in world aviation history, there were only four nonstop long-haul flights to Berlin’s Tegel (TXL) airport. United Airlines had a nonstop to TXL from Newark. Hainan Airlines flew nonstop from Beijing. There was a Scoot flight to Singapore (but it was dropped in 2020 even before Covid). Qatar Airways had a flight to Doha, and that is now the only long-haul route still operating out of BER.
Besides United (a Lufthansa partner), the only US carriers that ever flew nonstops to Berlin were American Airlines (from Philadelphia) and Delta (from New York’s JFK), and those were seasonal. But as I write this not a single US or other airline offers a nonstop between the USA and BER. People really need to stop taking that for granted!
The Tegel Excuse is Gone
While Tegel was still in operation, the airlines at least had an excuse. TXL was the product of a divided city, cut off from the outside world by a Wall and a country split in two. Once German reunification arrived, the little airport that could, couldn’t. It soon became apparent that this “charming” relic of isolated West Berlin was unable to adequately serve unified Berlin and the contemporary aviation age. The design and construction of a new airport for the German capital began late and took much too long to complete, with delay after delay. I previously wrote about the TXL-to-BER story and the saga of two airports, but as the pandemic wanes, there are no longer any excuses for Berlin having a flight schedule that is a very pale shadow of what happens in Frankfurt and Munich, Germany’s two main air transport hubs.
Airberlin
Anyone remember Airberlin? At one time it was Germany’s second largest airline. Before its collapse in 2017, Airberlin had made plans to move its Tegel hub to BER. It badly needed that new facility, with its better infrastructure, to serve connecting passengers and operate its hub in a way that simply was impossible at TXL. In fact, Berlin’s sudden and unexpected failure to open BER in 2012, as planned and ticketed, was one big contributing factor to Airberlin’s demise.
Berlin airport boss Engelbert Lütke-Daldrup declared in September 2017 that Airberlin’s bankruptcy would have no significant impact on the projected traffic volume at BER because some of Airberlin’s routes had been taken over by other carriers, including Lufthansa. The former government-owned German flag carrier, only privatized since 1997, promised to expand its presence in Berlin, but little actually happened, and the few flights that Lufthansa did add at TXL were flown by its low-cost Eurowings division. With the pandemic distorting air traffic at BER, it’s hard to know what Lufthansa will eventually do at BER, but the airline has never shown any enthusiasm for making Berlin a third German hub, after Frankfurt and Munich. Airberlin briefly offered nonstop flights between Los Angeles (LAX) and Berlin, the two sister cities, something that Lufthansa has never done. Lufthansa apparently fears that adding long-haul flights at a new BER hub would be detrimental to its success at FRA and MUC. On its website, Lufthansa proudly proclaims: “From here [BER], Lufthansa flies regularly and directly to Frankfurt and Munich airports. This means that all Lufthansa destinations are also available from Berlin with just one change.” Lufthansa seems to think that’s actually a good thing. Meanwhile the dominant airline at BER today is the leisure carrier easyJet.
An Airberlin A330-200 aircraft. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons
The German airline has also indirectly, through political influence, blocked Emirates from flying to/from Berlin, avoiding having to compete with the upscale Dubai-based carrier, with its all-wide-body aircraft (long-haul) fleet. The bilateral aviation agreement for Germany excludes Berlin, even though Emirates does (or did) fly out of Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich – all smaller cities than Berlin. Currently, Emirates also serves other European capital cities, including Athens, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Stockholm, Warsaw, and Vienna. But not Berlin. BER’s special jet bridge, built for the Airbus A380 jumbo jet that Emirates flies, remains unused.
At a 16 June 2021 press conference, Jan Eder, the Chief Executive of the IHK Berlin (Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Berlin) didn’t mince words. He knew what was holding Berlin back when it comes to international nonstop flights at the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport in the capital city, and its name is Lufthansa. In German he said: “That is politics aimed against Berlin! It can’t be that the national carrier is hanging us out to dry in its own interest.”
He wasn’t alone in his frustration. At the same presser, Engelbert Lütke Daldrup, the CEO of Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH, said that in the long run, if BER is going to survive financially, more long-haul flights are essential. He pointed out that people overseas just don’t understand why the capital city of the world’s fourth largest economy can’t be reached directly by air.
Even before the pandemic caused a drastic drop in flights at airports around the world, there were complaints about Berlin’s lack of nonstop international flights. Serious efforts to secure more long-haul flights for Berlin began in 2018 in anticipation of the opening of the new BER airport. A 2019 survey done by the IHK indicated that businesses in the German capital and the state of Brandenburg were increasingly unhappy about their inability to reach destinations on other continents without stopovers.
Unused Lufthansa aircraft parked at BER during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. PHOTO: Bautsch (Wikimedia Commons)
In 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, 35.6 million passengers passed through Berlin’s two airports (TXL and SXF), while Germany’s largest hub in Frankfurt recorded over 70.5 million passengers. Some 47.9 million used Munich’s airport. In 2021, the BER airport authority stated it wanted to establish 25 long-haul routes from Berlin by 2025, including negotiations for a revised bilateral agreement to allow Emirates to serve a fifth German city (Berlin). But if past history is any indication, that may be unlikely. However, the Berlin region’s business leaders are truly fed up with the dearth of international nonstop flights from BER, and they have been pressuring everyone from the airlines to politicians for a change. The IHK has pointed out that in 2018, employees from Berlin and Brandenburg-based companies logged a total of 1.55 million long-haul-flight business trips that couldn’t be made from Berlin. And that doesn’t include the number of tourists who could have avoided flying via Frankfurt, Munich, London, or other cities on their way to and from Berlin.
The Green Argument for More BER Long-Haul Flights
For all its claims to the contrary, Germany often fails on the ecological front (coal, cars, etc.), and the ecological damage caused by an additional leg between Frankfurt or Munich for international passengers flying to Berlin does not help. More nonstop flights to and from BER would reduce the airlines’ and Germany’s carbon footprint. About 55 percent of travelers landing at FRA were changing planes. Many of them making the short hop via jet between Berlin and Frankfurt (70 minutes, 266 air miles). I myself have done it many times, sometimes being good and taking a high-speed ICE train (just under four hours). And guess which airline dominates the nonstop FRA-BER route. That would be Lufthansa, with an average of five flights per day.
I live on the West Coast of the United States. I’m hoping to fly to Germany in 2021 – if possible. When and if I do fly to Berlin next time, I hope to be able to do so without first flying to Frankfurt or Munich. But I have my doubts that it will happen – even by 2025. In any event, I hope that Berlin will eventually get the kind of air service a European national capital deserves. It’s long overdue.
– HF
As a resident of Berlin, I really hope to see more Intercontinental flights from BER. United Airlines announced non-stop flights to Newark and Washington-Dulles starting from Summer 2022. Qatar Airways lacks daily frequency. In spite of no Emirates at BER, Qatar Airways alone can improve proper connectivity to Asia.