Berlin Brandenburg Starts Flight Operations
First flights over the weekend mark the opening of the German capital city’s long-awaited airport
Berlin Brandenburg Airport Willy Brandt (BER) is finally open with the first flights over the weekend marking the event, after nearly a decade of delays. The arrival of Easyjet and Lufthansa flights on Saturday Oct. 31, were the first operations to take place,
However a planned parallel landing featuring both Easyjet and Lufthansa was scrapped due to bad weather. The first scheduled departure aboard an Easyjet flight on Sunday,
Airlines serving BER will gradually move services over to the new facility throughout the next week, with the old Berlin Tegel airport closing permanently on Nov. 8.
The new airport concentrates all air traffic for Berlin at one facility, with a total annual capacity of 40 million passengers.
Terminals 1 and 2 are located between the airport’s two parallel northern and southern runways. Schonefeld airport has been incorporated into the new facility and is now renamed Terminal 5, located in the northern area of the new airport.
Flughafen BER Terminal 1-2, the airport’s rail station located directly under Terminal 1 on level U2, is already open. It has been built to handle up to 125,000 passengers per day across three platforms and six tracks.
The Steigenberger Airport Hotel Berlin, which had also been mothballed for most of the decade, has also opened for business.
“With Berlin Brandenburg Airport Willy Brandt, eastern Germany can now rely on airport infrastructure that will serve as a solid basis for the coming decades,” said Engelbert Lütke Daldrup, CEO, Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH. “The people here in the German capital region had to wait a long time for this day.”
