[Berlin] Airport's Time Is Running Out (but What a Time It Was)

[Kellanved]

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
New York Times

BERLIN - This city is, by any definition, a great world capital, though you almost would not know that walking into the departure hall of Tempelhof Airport, which is as quiet as an old-fashioned dentist's waiting room, a very large one with gleaming linoleum floors, a soaring ceiling and the almost audible sound of history whispering someplace.

"Not exactly the atmosphere of a major international airport, is it?" said Burkhard Kieker, an official at the Berlin Airport Authority, which runs all three of the city's airports, nodding ruefully at the adjacent departures hall, where perhaps half a dozen people were waiting for flights to such nearby destinations as Muenster and Osnabrueck.

Kieker was explaining why the Airport Authority and the city-state of Berlin have, after long deliberation and much protest, decided to close Tempelhof, thereby bringing to an end one of the longest and most important stories in aviation history.
...
The whole thing is monumental in the fashion of totalitarian architecture; indeed the roof itself forms a sort of amphitheater designed to seat 100,000 spectators at the mass victory celebrations the Nazis planned. Still, downstairs on the tarmac, the feeling is airy and elegant. The many people who want to keep Tempelhof going include architecture-preservation advocates, people with a sentimental attachment to the place where Berlin's freedom was preserved, and some in the general aviation business who want to continue using the airport for their operations, in part because it's a classy place to fly clients to the German capital. The businessman's contention is that Tempelhof would be bustling again if only the authorities would stop saying that they are going to close it down, which, the businessmen say, scares away potential users. "We can make money from this airport," Thomas Stillmann, the president of Windrose Air, a jet charter operation, said. He was sitting in his office in one of the airport building's wings next to Wolfgang Vieweg, the managing director of Germania, a discount airline that has made a sort of 11th hour offer to take over Tempelhof, and to use it as a base of operations while attracting other discount airlines to use it too.

...
http://www.iht.com/articles/530132.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1278194,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1269048,00.html

[bobbieinok]

1. great pictures........did the Berlin Airlift flights go in and out of

Tempelhof?

I think I flew out of there in Aug 62, but don't remember much about the architecture.

[Kellanved]

2. exactly: 30 C-47 Skytrains landed per hour

A great deed remembered in- and outside of Berlin.


The architecture is very imposing, probably the most "Nazi" buildings left in Berlin.
I've never actually boarded (or left) a flight there, but it is actually the "best" Berlin Airport: S-Bahn and U-Bahn stations and located right in the city-center.