Five years ago, the lounges and gates of this new European international airport looked vastly different from what they do today. In 2019, it sat ghostly quiet with luggage carousels continuing to rotate without any suitcases, and its nearby hotel rooms were empty and gathering dust.
Berlin Brandenburg Airport, just south of the German capital, was originally planned to open in 2011 but it did not begin operations until 2020, 14 years after construction started and an incredible 29 years after official planning began. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany a year later, leaders set about making plans to prove the city’s importance by constructing a huge commercial airport.
As the two cities became one, the age of the existing airports – Tegel, Schönefeld and Tempelhof – became increasingly apparent and congested with rising passenger numbers. After taking six years to settle on a site – next to Schönefeld – the airport was finally approved in 2004.
The state-of-the-art facility was expected to handle up to 27 million passengers a year, with a budget set at 2.83 billion euros (£2.4 billion) in 2009. However, by late 2012, expenditures had reached 4.3 billion euros (£3.6 billion).
Then, just a few weeks before Berlin Brandenburg Airport’s grand opening in 2012, an inspector found that the majority of its fire safety system was faulty, with over half a million faults, according to The B1M. the budget grew further, to an eyewatering 7 billion euros (£5.8 billion).
Just as the airport was ready for operation, the pandemic hit, grounding thousands of flights across the world. In 2020, just under 445,000 passengers used the new airport.
But by the time the travel industry had recovered, Berlin Brandenburg Airport was finally drawing in the crowds it had first hoped for: 9.9 million in 2021; 19.8 million in 2022; 23 million in 2023; and an impressive 25.5 million last year, according to BER.
With its luggage carousels and lounges once gathering dust five years ago, now Berlin Brandenburg Airport stands as one of the major air hubs in Europe and the third busiest in Germany.
What’s more, in 2023 it won the Airport Innovation Award, beating Vienna, Frankfurt and Amsterdam and a recent audit by Skytrax awarded it a four-star rating for its efficiency and service quality.
It also stands as one of the first airports in the world to use AI in its operations to analyse aircraft handling in real-time.
Although it took as long to open Berlin Brandenburg Airport as the Berlin Wall stood – about three decades – today it stands as one of the most impressive examples of modern aviation infrastructure.