Qualla: Berlin Brandenburg Airport

Berlin Brandenburg Airport: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Muns, CC BY 3.0. Diepensee went first. In 2004 the village's 335 residents took their compensation, moved into new houses at Königs Wusterhausen, and left the ground they had lived on to be cleared for a runway. Selchow's 35 villagers followed in the middle of 2005. Construction began the next year with an opening booked for October 2011. The airport those villages made way for opened on 31 October 2020: fourteen years after the first shovel, twenty-nine years after Berlin started planning it, and about nine years after the people of Diepensee could reasonably have expected to hear something overhead. Berlin Brandenburg is now a perfectly ordinary airport that handles twenty-six million people a year, which is somehow the least interesting thing about it.

Image: Muns | CC BY 3.0

Berlin Brandenburg Airport: Three Airports Into One

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Wolf (Webseite), CC BY-SA 3.0. Berlin came out of the Cold War holding three airports and no coherent plan. Tegel had served West Berlin from a hexagonal terminal built for a smaller and more isolated city. Schönefeld had been East Berlin's. Tempelhof sat in the middle of town, a 1930s monument with a runway t...

Image: Michael Wolf (Webseite) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Berlin Brandenburg Airport: Making Smoke Go Down

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phaeton1, CC BY-SA 3.0. The delay has many parents, but the fire safety system deserves top billing. The terminal was designed with smoke extraction ducts in the ceiling that, for aesthetic reasons, would not vent through the roof. Smoke was instead to be drawn from the ceiling down a shaft and out thro...

Image: Phaeton1 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Berlin Brandenburg Airport: Four Weeks' Notice

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phaeton1, CC BY-SA 3.0. Trials began on 24 November 2011. Twelve thousand volunteers checked in, cleared security, boarded and reclaimed 15,000 pieces of luggage, working night operations and emergency scenarios. Airlines rewrote their timetables. Shops fitted out their units. A Lufthansa A380 was booke...

Image: Phaeton1 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Berlin Brandenburg Airport: The Decade of Dates

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arne Müseler, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Then came 17 March 2013, then 27 October 2013, then, in January 2013, no date at all: four opening dates announced and abandoned inside two years. Inspectors kept finding work that would have to be undone. Conduits held too many cables, or incompatible ones - telephone lines run ...

Image: Arne Müseler | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Berlin Brandenburg Airport: What Finally Opened

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robot8A, CC BY-SA 4.0. BER opened on 31 October 2020, into a pandemic that had emptied the skies - a scale of anticlimax that is difficult to arrange deliberately. Terminal 1 is built for 28 million passengers a year and Terminal 2, opened on 24 March 2022, for six million more. Terminal 5, the old Sch...

Image: Robot8A | CC BY-SA 4.0