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Hundreds of people have come to Berlin’s Tegel Airport to look around again between the Tower and Terminal A before it closes. One week after the opening of the new BER airport, the old airport closes this weekend.
There’s a lot of rush, said Daniel Tolksdorf, spokesman for Berlin Brandenburg Airport, especially on the visitor’s terrace. Only 100 guests are allowed there at a time. The free tickets required to enter the terrace had been reserved for days, Tolksdorf said.
From the terrace you could still see several takeoffs and landings – a total of 70 aircraft movements are pending for today Saturday, a dozen planes must say goodbye with water fountains at the exit.
Many families with children had passed by and a notable number of visitors who wanted to take photos with the camera and not the smartphone, Tolksdorf said. For many, it was less about selfies than capturing memories of the airport with the TXL abbreviation that has been familiar in Berlin for decades.
“The billboard with arrivals and departures is a popular motif,” Tolksdorf said. But the TXL bus, which many passengers know well, the tower or the famous hexagonal Terminal A was also often photographed.
The end of the airport remains controversial even on the weekend of its closure. The president of the Berlin FDP, Sebastian Czaja, calls it “a monument to democratic ignorance.” In 2015, his party and the Pro Tegel association started an initiative to keep Tegel open. In a referendum that was not binding on the Senate, there were almost a million votes for the issue in 2017, and therefore a narrow majority.
“Tegel is and will not be just a piece of Berlin, but has always been the source of income for the airport company FBB,” the FDP politician said on Saturday. “The Berlin Senate must now explain how it wants to save FBB from possible bankruptcy.” He accused red-red-green that anyone who so blatantly ignored a successful referendum was destroying confidence in democracy.
The “Close Tegel. Open the future” alliance sees it very differently: “We are happy – finally heavenly peace. No frights from sleep at six in the morning, no constant interruptions of conversations outside in the park,” he says in a message. “And no more airplanes will disturb your enjoyment with a glass of wine on the balcony in the evening.”
Tegel’s last two takeoffs are a Lufthansa flight to Munich on Saturday night and a French airline Air France flight to Paris. This closes the circle: the first scheduled flight to Tegel also completed an Air France plane. It landed on January 2, 1960.
At night, the lights will go out, as the airport company announced on Saturday, at exactly 7:45 p.m. Katy Krüger, Head of Terminal Management at FBB, takes care of that. “With the symbolic ‘lights out’, more than seven decades of aviation history will end at Tegel.”
