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Deserted Terminal A at Tegel Airport: on Wednesday, finally history
Photo:
Michael Kappeler / DPA
The place that was once part of the Franco-American airlift had to be content with the role of an emergency reserve in the end.
After half a year of the so-called standby phase, the former Berlin airport strikes the last hour in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday.
At midnight, the airport's duty to operate ends with the characteristic hexagonal main terminal building in the north of Berlin.
It is then no longer an airport in the legal sense.
The last passenger plane, an Air France in the direction of Paris, had already taken off on November 8th.
The new BER airport in Schönefeld opened a week earlier and has been used to handle air traffic in the capital region since then.
Tegel had to remain operational for half a year if there were problems at BER.
But in view of the low passenger numbers in the corona crisis, the old airport did not have to be reactivated once.
The ugly, functional facility, which exudes the charm of old Karstadt branches from the seventies, has mainly served as a corona vaccination center in recent months.
The site and the buildings are to be handed over to the State of Berlin gradually by August.
Then the state-owned Tegel Projekt GmbH takes care of the further development of the area: The Beuth University of Technology is to move into the iconic main terminal.
The company also wants to build around 5000 new wooden apartments as well as a technical and industrial park on the site.
The Tegel architecture is a design by the architects Meinhard von Gerkan and Volkwin Marg. Construction began in 1970 and was inaugurated four years later.
Since then, the number of passengers has risen almost continuously until the onset of the corona crisis and has reached dimensions for which the building was not designed for a long time: Of the around 36 million passengers in Berlin in 2019, around 24 million traveled via Tegel.
ssu / dpa
