Jaunted

Transportation

Big Plans for Big Buildings in Berlin

September 12, 2006 at 10:25 AM | 0 Comments

Fresh off their huge new railway terminal in central Berlin, the city's planners have something even bigger in mind: a new airport. As it stands now, air traffic into Berlin is divided between three airports (Schönefeld, Tempelhof, and Tegel) but by 2011, it is to be centralized in a new complex on the site of the current Schönefeld airport.

Tempelhof, which was built by the Nazis to be the biggest building in the world at the time, now only serves 40 flights a day despite the huge size. Tegel, Berlin's current hub, will also close when the new airport (called Berlin-Brandenburg, or BBI) opens.

LCC's like EasyJet, which currently flies to Schönefeld, worry that they'll get the worst gates when the new airport opens, and conservationists wonder why Tempelof, which is only 10 minutes from downtown Berlin--compared to 45 for Schönefeld--needs to go the way of the dodo while it's still underutilized and convenient. As for us, we wodnder if the Germans couldn't build something a little smaller, for once?

[Image via Night Owl City/Flickr]

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