The airport in the north of Berlin said goodbye to the last plane in the direction of Paris on Sunday. Then it's over and the airport is ready for operation.
After 60 years of operation, the last aircraft will take off from Berlin's Tegel Airport on Sunday (3 p.m.). The airport in the north of the capital will then cease operations completely, but will remain operational for the next six months. Tegel will then lose its license on May 4, 2021. The last flight will be an Air France flight to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. The airline was the first to land in Tegel in 1960. Now it should be the last airline to take off from there. Mainly guests of honor and journalists are expected on board.
Airport boss Engelbert Lütke Daldrup wants to say goodbye to the last aircraft together with Berlin's Governing Mayor, Michael Müller (SPD), and the French ambassador to the Federal Republic, Anne-Marie Descôtes, on site. "Following the departure of the last flight, Engelbert Lütke Daldrup will symbolically hand over the key to the TXL Airport to the Governing Mayor of Berlin for Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH", announced the airport company. At 7.45 p.m. the light is then symbolically switched off.
Tegel is no longer open to visitors on Sunday
However, the airport is no longer open to visitors on Sunday. The last day of regular operation was on Saturday. Thousands of visitors came to say goodbye to the popular location. From the visitor terrace they looked at the last aircraft taking off and landing in regular operation.
From now on, air traffic in the capital will be handled in Schönefeld at the new BER airport. After years of delays, the new airport opened on Saturday last week. The airport's new southern runway has also been in operation since Wednesday.
Last year, more than 24 million passengers took off and landed at Tegel Airport, which was last designed for around 10 million passengers a year. For years, a large part of the air traffic in the capital has been handled via the location, which was completely overloaded until recently. The airline Easyjet, which was the largest operator in Berlin until then, operated the largest location outside of its home country England in Tegel. Many domestic flights also took off and landed there.
However, the Corona crisis had almost brought air traffic to a standstill in the spring and currently only around a third of the machines are flying compared to normal times.