In mid-February 2021, the last passengers coming from Rome were processed at the old airport terminal in Berlin-Schoenefeld. With the landing of the Ryanair plane, a chapter of the former “GDR central airport” came to an end.
With the opening of the new capital airport BER in the south of Schönefeld at the end of October 2020, the building was renamed T5. It was planned that low-cost airlines would continue to be processed here. But the pandemic brought it to an early end. The drastically reduced air traffic figures speak for themselves: Instead of 100,000 passengers, only 10,000 passengers are counted in Berlin per day.
The handling capacities in Schönefeld will no longer be required once Terminal 2 at BER has been commissioned, they will only cause costs. With the once “temporary” closure, the operating company, Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH (FBB), wanted to save up to 25 million euros a year.
On the following pages of the photo series we show motifs from the long history of the airport, which was created from a runway built in 1936 by the Henschel aircraft factory. After the Second World War, under the leadership of the Soviets, the expansion into a civilian airport began.
Also read:
– Bye bye, Berlin-Schoenefeld – An obituary for the GDR airport
– Liquidation of an aviation legend: The last flight of Interflug
– How Berlin’s air traffic has been on drips for decades