Tegel was very overcrowded, but it must be said that it was operating at TWICE its design-capacity. As a passenger I was ok with it. It took me rarely more than 10 minutes from Taxi to the gate and the airport was close to the city center. The downside was that there wasn't much to do and when you ended up at the gate and your plane was delayed, you might have spent hours waiting a long time in a closed waiting area with nothing to do. Ironically, TXL might NOW get a proper public transport connection (Tram or Subway) to supply the new "Urban Tech Republic".
Until BER opened, Tegel Terminal C was probably the best travelling solution Berlin had to offer. Unfortunately it closed every evening at 21:00 and you had to walk over to the hex bagel and spend the night there, with no shops open and most coffee machines out of change.
Ah, Berlin Tegel. My favourite memory is sitting on the terminal floor, eating a bag of Reeses peanut butter cups that's I'd bought in duty free while crying because my plane to Manchester airport was delayed by two hours, I couldn't get hold of my parents to let them know, and I'd only ever flown once before (that being Manchester to Berlin on the way there). I was very tired. Fond memories, I will miss you, Tegel.
Tegel looked like a hexagonal bagel. As CGP Grey stated days ago, hexagons are the "bestagons." But clearly Tegel had to go, as Berlin grew up like 10-fold (at least?) since 1960.
_"grew up like 10-fold"_ ??? city limits of berlin are mostly unchanged since they joined lots of villages to create "Great-Berlin" in 1920, and population also stayed roughly the same (1920: 3.9M, 1949: 3.3M, later decades 2.2M west and 1.1M east, current in 2019: 3,769 M) what may have grown up 10-fold or more is the air traffic and already when they planned BER, Tegel had a multiple of passengers relative to its original official capacity. thus they built the new BER a lot bigger, but while they still continued construction, the number of passengers had kept growing and the used capacity of TXL was larger than the planned capacity of BER. thanks to corona, maybe capacity now will be barely large enough again ... imho (as a Berliner :-) they should have used both, just like they should have closed the old Tempelhof airport not when starting to build BER but only after finishing construction. this would also have solved another problem that few other capitals and big cities have: if a single airport is temporarily unusable because of fog or other bad wheather (which is even more probable at BER "in the countryside next to Berlin" compared to a location inside a city), because of an accident, or whatever other reason, the next usable airport (at least for bigger planes) is probably 150km away (Leipzig, if that doesn't have wheather/winter problems on the same day too) ... i already was told by a taxi driver last year how much he enjoyed bad wheather at TXL because lots of taxis were sent from Berlin to Leipzig for getting the passengers of rerouted planes to Berlin and getting twice the long distance charge for going back and forth.
By birth only, apparently 🙄 A German is obliged to know every single detail about Germany, s/he is walking Wikipedia, and s/he is always ready to prove his/her citizenship. /s
@@appleslover You've got a point there. :-) Still, I consider myself to be reasonably well informed and usually know at least a little bit about the subjects that rewboss is talking about. And then I am always suprised and impressed about the details he was able to research--and to explain them in an interesting manner. (Yes, I know, you can't know everything, and if you do the research, you are bound to find details that you didn't know before ... But still--just let me be impressed. :-))
Tegel was so efficient. The only airport where I felt comfortable arriving 1h/1:20h before the flight departure. Good luck doing this in Schönefeld or BER...
This is a great year to open an airport ;) I'm gonna miss the long running joke about BER never opening. I remember Tegel fondly from the one time I arrived there, I can remember waiting for our luggage and seeing my aunt and uncle waiting for us on the other side of a sliding door.
The German satire magazine Postillon actually joked about the government wanting to give the people back a sense of normality during these times, and therefore decided to postpone the opening of BER for another 3 years ;-)
Tegel was a great airport back in its day, when air travel was less popular (and way more expensive) and security measures were less severe. Today, though, it is way to small. The reason why the second concourse was never built is Schönefeld, btw. Or rather a thaw in relations between the two Germanies. Shortly after Tegel was opened, the GDR, West-Berlin and the FRG agreed that Schönefeld would be opened to Westerners (they got their own gate and a special bus from Rudow), thus making the second concourse redundant. Edit: as Erik pointed out, the bus didn't leave from Rudow, but West-Berlin's central bus station.
@@erik_griswold Thank you for that additional information. I never flew to or from Schönefeld back then (we took the train, flying was fucking expensive), so I had no first hand experience. I made the mistake of relying on conjecture. My bad.
It also allowed more competition between airlines since civilian flights to Tempelhof and Tegel were limited by the original four-power agreements to the Allied flag carriers (BEA/British Airways, Pan Am and Air France). Technically that agreement also applied to Aeroflot and to any airport that might have come to exist in East Berlin, which is why Schönefeld was built in LDS outside city limits.
Tegel was wonderful in the 80s and even in the 90s. If you came by taxi or someone took you by car, they could drop you off in the inner circle right near your gate. If you came or went by bus, it wasn't very far either because of the circle. The worst that could happen to a badly oriented person like me was having to walk the longer "half" of the circle from bus stop to gate. And run down though it may have been for the past 15 years or so, I loved it. (The "old" terminal, anyway.) I loved Tempelhof, too. They were too small, both of them, I can't deny it. But I loved them more than any other airport I know.
Andrew, I can't watch this. I have tears in my eyes. I flew so many times out of TXL to various destinations, and it was one of the world's most beautiful airports, almost inner city, and lovely. I will never forget how the express bus took me and my girlfriend from Schöneberg to TXL at -14°C and 5 in the morning, and eight hours later we went off the Boeing 747, that big old jet airliner, in Bombay at +32°C. I never took a flight for five in the morning again. That's the time I usually go to sleep. So, good night!
I have been there only once, 2 months before the closing. "One of the most beautiful airports"...what?? Come on, it's an ugly gray concrete box that's a joke as an airport for our capital.
Great designs that do not scale up easily. (Like trying to put a family of twelve into a beautifully laid out and crafted 'tiny home' designed for two.)
It's what I call an "over-optimized" design. It was designed to fit a very specific set of criteria, and did it very well, but couldn't adapt to new ones when they came along.
I have never been on any commercial airliner, or on an airport (except I think Frankfurt airport once in my childhood), but upon the closing, I have read people comment that Tegel was a very efficient airport as long as you weren't flying during the "rush hour" (or whatever the aviation equivalent of rush hour is called). I only think that the architecture of the hexagonal terminal building is really pretty, just like the ICC, it has this futuristic "space ship" look that promised a future where everything is better due to technology (architects back then obviously didn't have the human factor in mind, which of course made the future as dull as it is now that we live in it, but that's a whole different story). I have now gotten the information that Tegel's terminal building is protected by monument conservation, which gives me a lot of relief, especially since there are still people trying to tear down the ICC, one of the city's most beautiful modern buildings (of course, we also have many beautiful old buildings, but this modern beauty is almost of another world, again, inspired by a better future outlook).
Gonna miss flying into Tegel, especially with just hand luggage as I could be off the plane and on the bus within 20 minutes. Wasn't overly impressed with flying out of it though, as the departure lounges had very limited items on offer, especially if you had a long wait for your flight!
Only if you were lucky to arrive on terminal A and when there were enough personnel unloading your plane. In the last years waiting times for luggage multiplied, once I had to wait almost one hour, that was in Terminal C (ex AirBerlin). So, Tegel was a great concept (Terminal A) in the 70s and 80s. Later it grew out of modern passenger numbers and aircraft sizes.
Well, during the blockade of Berlin, there was a THIRD airport, Gatow - which was in the British sector. This was however, a military airport. It's now a museum of military aviation. Also, water planes landed on the Havel for that purpose. On a note: a modern C5 could easily have taken care of those requirements, having a 140 ton capacity vs. 6 tons for a DC3 (that's over 20 planes - it would have reduced the number of flights per day to a mere 75). The Tempelhof airport was in still use until the 1990-ies. And it was WORTH it. It was like a time capsule. Flights were still listed on a blackboard (really!) and you'd often had to WALK to your intended flight. It was if you were transported back to the '50-ies! BTW, an arrival at night was really an experience! The Dutchies often called it "Tepelhof" (Google translate that one). It's now a massive park, well worth a visit.
As someone who lives about 10 minutes by public transport away from Tegel airport (at least when the TXL bus was still running), I find all the problems listed greatly exaggerated. Tegel only ran into crowding issues when it was well above its planned capacity. That happens to any kind of infrastructure that is run beyond its maximum capacity, and is not an issue of the airport design per se. In fact, the airport design was one of its greatest advantages: security checks were never an issue because every checkpoint only served 1-2 gates, while personnel could be shifted around as needed. This is something most airports struggle nowadays as a choke point for passengers. Besides that, Tegel was never designed as a hub, and was never used by any airline as such. Basically nobody arrived there to catch a connecting flight, so this is a mostly imaginary problem. The real reason why Tegel was sometimes a PITA was that it was never properly extended (terminal D was just a glorified shed with the same security check capacity issues as other airports), essentially because when it would have been necessary to extend it, the political choice had already been made to retire all the Berlin airports in favour of the new Berlin-Brandenburg airports. It was a conscious choice not to improve anything, and so that just exacerbated problems. But at that time, Tegel was already running at roughly 10 times the passengers of its original planned capacity, which was actually quite a feat in itself. As long as you understand Tegel as essentially a provincial terminal airport, it still is the best design you will reasonably get, except for one aspect: maximizing commercialization and extracting the most money from passengers on their way to their gate. That‘s one thing Tegel did poorly, but I consider that a decidedly good thing.
Tegel was built to serve 1.5 million West-Berliners. Because of the wall there was no prospect of any significant growth, so the concept made perfect sense back then. Everything changed of course after the reunification and Tegel suddenly serving whole Berlin and surroundings plus seeing a significant increase in business travel and tourism. I would still have loved to see it stay open and serve as a city airport for short distance flights.
My mom was a flight attendand and loved this airport for it short distances. When the closing ceremony was televised, you bet we watched the wohle thing. She for sure teared up at the end xD Because of this video I am yet again sad I will never experience this airport :')
To be fair: The referendum in 2017 was a joke and part of a populist campaign. Unfortunately the city of Berlin - and so neither its government nor its inhabitants by a referendum - did not have the legal authority to decide over the closing of Tegel. As the airport is (was) owned by Berlin, the state of Brandenburg and the Federal Republic there was no way that one of these partners could decide that topic alone. So the referendum was not legally binding the Senate to keep Tegel open but more of a request to politely ask the two other partners - who always said that the legal situation does not allow such a descision because the future closing of Tegel was part of the permission to build the new airport. So the people were lead by populists to believe that they could decide something they never were competent for. And now the same populists can complain how a "vote from the people" has beed ignored by these mean and arrogant politicians.
Agreed. And the operating license for Tegel was combined with the one for the new BER. So when BER opened, TXL had to automatically close. For TXL to continue to operate it would have needed a new license which would have been impossible to obtain considering the noise level.
Last year i had a flight to Lisbon to take at Tegel, and i ran around that ring 2 times before i figured out Lisbon in german is Lissabon. (It was also very early and the desk wasn't unique to the company but still)
I went to school near Tegel airport and let me tell you, the noise levels were horrible. Especially in the summer, when you had to have open windows, our teachers had to regularly interrupt themselves speaking so that we could hear them. The effect was obviously worse in the higher floors, with heat and noise levels rising.
During the early 70ies I have been living in West-Berlin for some time, and considered myself to knowing the place quite well. About two years ago I took a flight from Berlin to Greece, had to go to Berlin by train. and transfer to Tegel, to go onto the plane. My experience with Security and other official personnel was so extremely bad, that I was really ashamed of of our "Bundeshauptstadt". Obviously as soon as the pressure from outside diminished and disappeared, the worst habits of the prussian soul seemed to crawl out of the dark depths in the backs of the local heads to tease, mistreat and to execute their little powers as if it would be still the times of Wilhelm II. This way the difficulties in keeping, opening and closing an airport is not a question of architecture but on prussian habits. On a closer look you will realize many things unheard of in other parts of Germany. Germany is not yet united by far.
Berlin had 3 Airports Tempelhof (THF) was closed in 2008 and + East German military Airport. The best start in a plane i ever had was on Tempelhof: Plane on brakes, propeller to max RPM and than brakes relased - start like a jet on a carrier catapult. It has looked like this: ua-cam.com/video/Vn2sYqjq-EM/v-deo.html
2 things: 55dB is quite silent. (if you measure in a forest in spring you will be above 60 dB. And BER will be the one and only airport in europe or the world in 2020 that had an increase in passengers and flight movements. ;-)
The first thing to point out is that decibels are relative, not absolute: 0 dB is not "nothing" but "unchanged from the original". My voice in this video is slightly below 0 dB; if I wanted to broadcast this on TV, I'd have to normalize it to something like -18 dB. "55 decibels" is inaccurate: in this case it's actually 55 dB(A) Lden. "Lden" means that the noise level is averaged out over a 24-hour period, with a penalty of 5 dB in the evening and 10 dB at night ("Lden" means "day-evening-night level", and is weighted to take into account the fact that night-time noise is more disturbing). So this doesn't mean that the noise can be as high as 55 dB. It means that if you compare with what is measure against what you would expect if you took away all human activity, the human activity adds 55 dB... but on average. The peaks can be much, much higher. 55 dB(A) Lden is the threshold for excessive noise pollution in the EU. The WHO believes that this level causes serious disruption to sleep (a level of 40 db(A)Lnight is enough to do that) and associated health problems.
@@rewboss Thanks for ansering! But, be aware that the level you see for your recording is not the same dB as dBA. "A" means it is "overlaid" with the hearing curve of the human ear. While the other is in the power of the electrical microphone signal (in dBW) Your 0dB recording means the microphone signal has a power of 1W and you normalize it to 15 mW. As you are well spoken in german, maybe take a look at this site to see the difference in dB for noise and dB for electical power.: www.sengpielaudio.com/Rechner-pegelaenderung.htm As far as i remember. things being quieter than 40 dB is not really achievable in the real world outside of deserts or when the whole area is covert in snow to dampen the noise. (55 dBA even averaged out over the day is ridiculously low just for nature. Birds are much louder than that, if there's a tree near the measuring point and there's wind or rain you are much above that) Have you ever been to a noise canceling room (for lack of a better term). I mean a soundproof room with noise "eating" foam covered walls, roof and floor? I have, and as bad as it sounds, it is very uncomfortable on the ears. In this case i think EU officials have taken values scientists gave them and reduced them on their own, lacking of knowledge in the field. And lastely as a little fun way of looking at noiselevels take a look at 6:23 here ua-cam.com/video/MpagMjUtDTg/v-deo.html
Tegel was a great airport. Fabulous schnellimbiss right outside the front door. Bus service to the door. Nowhere near as busy as other major city airports. What wasn’t to like?
@@varana Small enough to get around quickly. That suits many people. The bus connection which was regular took to you the nearest U Bahn station at Kurt Schumacher Platz which wasn’t far away. Not once did I get on a bus to or from Tegel where I couldn’t get a seat and I travelled to and from Berlin quite frequently.
I travelled not often through Tegel, the last time coming in from Barcelona in 2017. And when you came in from that busy international hub you became really the image of being landed on a small regional airport, something like Rostock-Laage or Saarbrücken - but a regional airport who was waaayyy much more crowded than this airports. I had to wait I think nearly two hours for my luggage, than sticking in the thick crowded area around the center. When I left the building just on the other side of the fence parked a 767 from MIAT Mongolian, you could nearly catch her with the hand. Ok - it seems to have been safe so. Than I sticked in a very large crowd waiting for the bus - and he does not come and he does not come and he does not come. When he finally arrived he was banged full in a few seconds with people and luggage - so I opted to wait for the next bus. Eventually I was on my way to the city and nearly missed than the station Kurt-Schumacher-Platz. It was something like a cave sprayed with graffiti and smelling of urine, I had to look a second time to identify it as a working station. When I finally arrived at the train station of Berlin-Spandau from where my connecting train went to Hamburg I felt like being back in civilization. It was definetely not the greatest airport experience of my life. But Tegel-Airport has clearly a huge and important history. It had a real avant-garde architecture which was great in its time. It was for me - living nearby Hamburg - always much nearer as travelling through the whole city towards Schönefeld. My personal conclusion remains ambivalent. If it should have stayed running as Germanies fourth-largest airport it would have needed a fundamental renovation.
Just imagine if the original Terminal B was built. Probably,still wouldn't have been enough I hope that U-Bahn station gets built with the new university and residential development.
Berlin has thus followed in the footsteps of Tokyo. Ask Tokyoites what they think of it... (Hint: Narita airport is placed so far out that the _fastest_ express train to it from the _closest_ of the major Tokyo train stations takes an hour(!). You can get halfway to Nagoya in that time with the shinkansen.).
BER isn't that far out of the city center, it's more akin to JFK or LaGuardia, or LAX after LA finally extends the Metro to it. Also reminds me of that that massive, half-abandoned white elephant, Montreal-Mirabel. I think it at least gets some use as a UPS/FedEx hub.
This is why I always fly into Kansai and take the train to Tokyo. It’s just a bit longer than using the NEX but more convenient and you get nicer coffee too.
I actually hate to be at the plane directly after checkin. I also hate that duty free shops. Still, for comfort a short time between checkin and takeoff is really bad. If I'm flying for my job I always get rid of some overtime-hours just for lounges.
I hated Tegel with a passion. It's the only airport I've ever flown to that's lost the same bag of mine twice. Both times having instead of putting it out for collection, taken it to the claim department. The flight lounge was pre security, so you checked in your bags, went to the lounge and had to fight your way back to the gate to go through security. Honestly it's the worst airport I've ever been to... that is until they opened BER. It looks like it was designed in the 1970's, doesn't have the facilities or capacity to cope and worst of all... no wait that's it.
RIP, Tegel. You will be missed. A friend asked a german colleague why they don't reopen Tempelhof, and got the answer that "it's too much Hitler". I think that the germans will have to rethink Tempelhof once BBR hits its capacity ceiling.
Tempelhof is right in the middle of a residential district -- there are houses right at the end of its runways -- and can't handle modern jet airliners. That's why Tegel was opened to civilian traffic in the first place: Tempelhof was too small even in the 1960s.
The Kansas City airport KCI is similar to Tegel's design with a short walk from where a car would drop off a passenger to the gate. It was designed with the idea that a person could be dropped off by a taxi walk a short distance get on a plane and then pay for the ticket on the flight. Since airlines provided full meals passengers didn't need to eat at the airport. See this article in the Kansas City Star for more details www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article341740.html Kansas City is building a new terminal.
Tegel was indeed built after the concept of a car-dominated city which was very popular in the 1960ies: you could reach or leave Tegel very well by car - ok, at least outside the rushhour ‐ but only by car. I think many airports built in this time - late 1960ies, early 1970ies - have the same design and I can very well imagine that it is in Kansas City, too. Two other aspects of this concept: Tegel was far away from any railroad and the planned metroline was never built. Public transport played no role in the design of this airport - unthinkable today. The space for all the new security stuff introduced after 9/11 was pretty small - the phenomenon of terrorism wasn't anticipated when this airport was built - and I can imagine this is also the case in many similar airport designed and built in that time - I don't know how it is in Kansas City with this topics.
No, it has nothing to do with that at all. The French did build a runway to help with the airlift, which was essentially a military operation. But they didn't have any part to play in the construction of the civilian airport, and the hexagonal terminal was designed by German architects working for a company based in Hamburg.
Neither does the capital of Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Norway or the Netherlands. If I‘m not mistaken, even the United States capital technically doesn’t have an airport. So by your own logic Berlin is in great company 😉
@@ft4709 You are correct on the US's part! The Ronald Reagan "Washington" National Airport is actually in nearby Arlington, Virginia, not in Washington, DC. In other words, Berlin is in _very_ great company!
Is "Germany" under national control? Are the things that happen in nations today a matter of sovereign or national power? Despite the darkness, you can hear and understand me, can't you?
The E-Prix circuit is on the apron, and isn't permanent. The future use of the terminal building is still unclear, but most of the area, where the runways and taxiways were, are currently a park.
It actually is because it's a chance to start slow with not so many flights and see how everything is holding up. Gives them a chance to improve things that do not work well while flights and passenger numbers are low. I think it's a good thing they started now.
Tegel was very overcrowded, but it must be said that it was operating at TWICE its design-capacity. As a passenger I was ok with it. It took me rarely more than 10 minutes from Taxi to the gate and the airport was close to the city center. The downside was that there wasn't much to do and when you ended up at the gate and your plane was delayed, you might have spent hours waiting a long time in a closed waiting area with nothing to do.
Ironically, TXL might NOW get a proper public transport connection (Tram or Subway) to supply the new "Urban Tech Republic".
Until BER opened, Tegel Terminal C was probably the best travelling solution Berlin had to offer. Unfortunately it closed every evening at 21:00 and you had to walk over to the hex bagel and spend the night there, with no shops open and most coffee machines out of change.
Ah, Berlin Tegel.
My favourite memory is sitting on the terminal floor, eating a bag of Reeses peanut butter cups that's I'd bought in duty free while crying because my plane to Manchester airport was delayed by two hours, I couldn't get hold of my parents to let them know, and I'd only ever flown once before (that being Manchester to Berlin on the way there). I was very tired.
Fond memories, I will miss you, Tegel.
Tegel looked like a hexagonal bagel.
As CGP Grey stated days ago, hexagons are the "bestagons."
But clearly Tegel had to go, as Berlin grew up like 10-fold (at least?) since 1960.
Tegel was fine until October 3rd, 1990.
_"grew up like 10-fold"_ ???
city limits of berlin are mostly unchanged since they joined lots of villages to create "Great-Berlin" in 1920,
and population also stayed roughly the same (1920: 3.9M, 1949: 3.3M, later decades 2.2M west and 1.1M east, current in 2019: 3,769 M)
what may have grown up 10-fold or more is the air traffic and already when they planned BER, Tegel had a multiple of passengers relative to its original official capacity. thus they built the new BER a lot bigger, but while they still continued construction, the number of passengers had kept growing and the used capacity of TXL was larger than the planned capacity of BER. thanks to corona, maybe capacity now will be barely large enough again ...
imho (as a Berliner :-) they should have used both, just like they should have closed the old Tempelhof airport not when starting to build BER but only after finishing construction. this would also have solved another problem that few other capitals and big cities have: if a single airport is temporarily unusable because of fog or other bad wheather (which is even more probable at BER "in the countryside next to Berlin" compared to a location inside a city), because of an accident, or whatever other reason, the next usable airport (at least for bigger planes) is probably 150km away (Leipzig, if that doesn't have wheather/winter problems on the same day too) ...
i already was told by a taxi driver last year how much he enjoyed bad wheather at TXL because lots of taxis were sent from Berlin to Leipzig for getting the passengers of rerouted planes to Berlin and getting twice the long distance charge for going back and forth.
@@erik_griswold Ja die Mauer hätte nie fallen dürfen. Bevor ich in den Osten ziehe, lebe ich lieber auf der Straße.
As always well researched and in all its details I learned a lot again, as a German.
I'm always amazed at the level of details in his video. The videos alone make me want to move back to Germany, lol.
By birth only, apparently 🙄
A German is obliged to know every single detail about Germany, s/he is walking Wikipedia, and s/he is always ready to prove his/her citizenship.
/s
@@appleslover You've got a point there. :-) Still, I consider myself to be reasonably well informed and usually know at least a little bit about the subjects that rewboss is talking about. And then I am always suprised and impressed about the details he was able to research--and to explain them in an interesting manner. (Yes, I know, you can't know everything, and if you do the research, you are bound to find details that you didn't know before ... But still--just let me be impressed. :-))
Tegel was so efficient. The only airport where I felt comfortable arriving 1h/1:20h before the flight departure. Good luck doing this in Schönefeld or BER...
This is a great year to open an airport ;)
I'm gonna miss the long running joke about BER never opening.
I remember Tegel fondly from the one time I arrived there, I can remember waiting for our luggage and seeing my aunt and uncle waiting for us on the other side of a sliding door.
The German satire magazine Postillon actually joked about the government wanting to give the people back a sense of normality during these times, and therefore decided to postpone the opening of BER for another 3 years ;-)
It’s probably gonna close down again very soon.. for renovation...
Tegel was a great airport back in its day, when air travel was less popular (and way more expensive) and security measures were less severe.
Today, though, it is way to small.
The reason why the second concourse was never built is Schönefeld, btw.
Or rather a thaw in relations between the two Germanies. Shortly after Tegel was opened, the GDR, West-Berlin and the FRG agreed that Schönefeld would be opened to Westerners (they got their own gate and a special bus from Rudow), thus making the second concourse redundant.
Edit: as Erik pointed out, the bus didn't leave from Rudow, but West-Berlin's central bus station.
The bus left from ZOB, but yes that was correct
@@erik_griswold Thank you for that additional information. I never flew to or from Schönefeld back then (we took the train, flying was fucking expensive), so I had no first hand experience. I made the mistake of relying on conjecture. My bad.
It also allowed more competition between airlines since civilian flights to Tempelhof and Tegel were limited by the original four-power agreements to the Allied flag carriers (BEA/British Airways, Pan Am and Air France). Technically that agreement also applied to Aeroflot and to any airport that might have come to exist in East Berlin, which is why Schönefeld was built in LDS outside city limits.
Tegel was wonderful in the 80s and even in the 90s. If you came by taxi or someone took you by car, they could drop you off in the inner circle right near your gate. If you came or went by bus, it wasn't very far either because of the circle.
The worst that could happen to a badly oriented person like me was having to walk the longer "half" of the circle from bus stop to gate.
And run down though it may have been for the past 15 years or so, I loved it. (The "old" terminal, anyway.)
I loved Tempelhof, too.
They were too small, both of them, I can't deny it. But I loved them more than any other airport I know.
Andrew, I can't watch this. I have tears in my eyes. I flew so many times out of TXL to various destinations, and it was one of the world's most beautiful airports, almost inner city, and lovely. I will never forget how the express bus took me and my girlfriend from Schöneberg to TXL at -14°C and 5 in the morning, and eight hours later we went off the Boeing 747, that big old jet airliner, in Bombay at +32°C.
I never took a flight for five in the morning again. That's the time I usually go to sleep. So, good night!
I have been there only once, 2 months before the closing. "One of the most beautiful airports"...what?? Come on, it's an ugly gray concrete box that's a joke as an airport for our capital.
Are you going to make a follow-up video about the new BER airport?
Great designs that do not scale up easily. (Like trying to put a family of twelve into a beautifully laid out and crafted 'tiny home' designed for two.)
It's what I call an "over-optimized" design. It was designed to fit a very specific set of criteria, and did it very well, but couldn't adapt to new ones when they came along.
I have never been on any commercial airliner, or on an airport (except I think Frankfurt airport once in my childhood), but upon the closing, I have read people comment that Tegel was a very efficient airport as long as you weren't flying during the "rush hour" (or whatever the aviation equivalent of rush hour is called). I only think that the architecture of the hexagonal terminal building is really pretty, just like the ICC, it has this futuristic "space ship" look that promised a future where everything is better due to technology (architects back then obviously didn't have the human factor in mind, which of course made the future as dull as it is now that we live in it, but that's a whole different story). I have now gotten the information that Tegel's terminal building is protected by monument conservation, which gives me a lot of relief, especially since there are still people trying to tear down the ICC, one of the city's most beautiful modern buildings (of course, we also have many beautiful old buildings, but this modern beauty is almost of another world, again, inspired by a better future outlook).
Gonna miss flying into Tegel, especially with just hand luggage as I could be off the plane and on the bus within 20 minutes.
Wasn't overly impressed with flying out of it though, as the departure lounges had very limited items on offer, especially if you had a long wait for your flight!
They invested nothing into the lounges, as they expected to close the airport much earlier.
@@Rick2010100 sounds about right.
Only if you were lucky to arrive on terminal A and when there were enough personnel unloading your plane. In the last years waiting times for luggage multiplied, once I had to wait almost one hour, that was in Terminal C (ex AirBerlin). So, Tegel was a great concept (Terminal A) in the 70s and 80s. Later it grew out of modern passenger numbers and aircraft sizes.
@@wanderschlosser1857 I mostly flew in with BA and they the had the same stand each time.
I was flying in 2019
Well, during the blockade of Berlin, there was a THIRD airport, Gatow - which was in the British sector. This was however, a military airport. It's now a museum of military aviation. Also, water planes landed on the Havel for that purpose. On a note: a modern C5 could easily have taken care of those requirements, having a 140 ton capacity vs. 6 tons for a DC3 (that's over 20 planes - it would have reduced the number of flights per day to a mere 75).
The Tempelhof airport was in still use until the 1990-ies. And it was WORTH it. It was like a time capsule. Flights were still listed on a blackboard (really!) and you'd often had to WALK to your intended flight. It was if you were transported back to the '50-ies! BTW, an arrival at night was really an experience! The Dutchies often called it "Tepelhof" (Google translate that one). It's now a massive park, well worth a visit.
I never had a problem at Tegel.
Sounds like Tegel was overoptimised.
As someone who lives about 10 minutes by public transport away from Tegel airport (at least when the TXL bus was still running), I find all the problems listed greatly exaggerated. Tegel only ran into crowding issues when it was well above its planned capacity. That happens to any kind of infrastructure that is run beyond its maximum capacity, and is not an issue of the airport design per se. In fact, the airport design was one of its greatest advantages: security checks were never an issue because every checkpoint only served 1-2 gates, while personnel could be shifted around as needed. This is something most airports struggle nowadays as a choke point for passengers. Besides that, Tegel was never designed as a hub, and was never used by any airline as such. Basically nobody arrived there to catch a connecting flight, so this is a mostly imaginary problem. The real reason why Tegel was sometimes a PITA was that it was never properly extended (terminal D was just a glorified shed with the same security check capacity issues as other airports), essentially because when it would have been necessary to extend it, the political choice had already been made to retire all the Berlin airports in favour of the new Berlin-Brandenburg airports. It was a conscious choice not to improve anything, and so that just exacerbated problems. But at that time, Tegel was already running at roughly 10 times the passengers of its original planned capacity, which was actually quite a feat in itself. As long as you understand Tegel as essentially a provincial terminal airport, it still is the best design you will reasonably get, except for one aspect: maximizing commercialization and extracting the most money from passengers on their way to their gate. That‘s one thing Tegel did poorly, but I consider that a decidedly good thing.
Tegel was built to serve 1.5 million West-Berliners. Because of the wall there was no prospect of any significant growth, so the concept made perfect sense back then. Everything changed of course after the reunification and Tegel suddenly serving whole Berlin and surroundings plus seeing a significant increase in business travel and tourism. I would still have loved to see it stay open and serve as a city airport for short distance flights.
My mom was a flight attendand and loved this airport for it short distances.
When the closing ceremony was televised, you bet we watched the wohle thing. She for sure teared up at the end xD
Because of this video I am yet again sad I will never experience this airport :')
To be fair: The referendum in 2017 was a joke and part of a populist campaign. Unfortunately the city of Berlin - and so neither its government nor its inhabitants by a referendum - did not have the legal authority to decide over the closing of Tegel. As the airport is (was) owned by Berlin, the state of Brandenburg and the Federal Republic there was no way that one of these partners could decide that topic alone. So the referendum was not legally binding the Senate to keep Tegel open but more of a request to politely ask the two other partners - who always said that the legal situation does not allow such a descision because the future closing of Tegel was part of the permission to build the new airport.
So the people were lead by populists to believe that they could decide something they never were competent for. And now the same populists can complain how a "vote from the people" has beed ignored by these mean and arrogant politicians.
Agreed. And the operating license for Tegel was combined with the one for the new BER. So when BER opened, TXL had to automatically close. For TXL to continue to operate it would have needed a new license which would have been impossible to obtain considering the noise level.
Last year i had a flight to Lisbon to take at Tegel, and i ran around that ring 2 times before i figured out Lisbon in german is Lissabon. (It was also very early and the desk wasn't unique to the company but still)
Sehr gut geklärt!
Tegel war ein sehr praktischer Flughafen, den ich 2019 auf meiner Reise genutzt habe. ✈➡ausgang
I went to school near Tegel airport and let me tell you, the noise levels were horrible. Especially in the summer, when you had to have open windows, our teachers had to regularly interrupt themselves speaking so that we could hear them. The effect was obviously worse in the higher floors, with heat and noise levels rising.
During the early 70ies I have been living in West-Berlin for some time, and considered myself to knowing the place quite well.
About two years ago I took a flight from Berlin to Greece, had to go to Berlin by train. and transfer to Tegel, to go onto the plane. My experience with Security and other official personnel was so extremely bad, that I was really ashamed of of our "Bundeshauptstadt".
Obviously as soon as the pressure from outside diminished and disappeared, the worst habits of the prussian soul seemed to crawl out of the dark depths in the backs of the local heads to tease, mistreat and to execute their little powers as if it would be still the times of Wilhelm II.
This way the difficulties in keeping, opening and closing an airport is not a question of architecture but on prussian habits. On a closer look you will realize many things unheard of in other parts of Germany.
Germany is not yet united by far.
Tegel was a masterpiece of brutalism. I loved it
Berlin had 3 Airports Tempelhof (THF) was closed in 2008 and + East German military Airport. The best start in a plane i ever had was on Tempelhof: Plane on brakes, propeller to max RPM and than brakes relased - start like a jet on a carrier catapult.
It has looked like this: ua-cam.com/video/Vn2sYqjq-EM/v-deo.html
2 things: 55dB is quite silent. (if you measure in a forest in spring you will be above 60 dB. And BER will be the one and only airport in europe or the world in 2020 that had an increase in passengers and flight movements. ;-)
The first thing to point out is that decibels are relative, not absolute: 0 dB is not "nothing" but "unchanged from the original". My voice in this video is slightly below 0 dB; if I wanted to broadcast this on TV, I'd have to normalize it to something like -18 dB.
"55 decibels" is inaccurate: in this case it's actually 55 dB(A) Lden. "Lden" means that the noise level is averaged out over a 24-hour period, with a penalty of 5 dB in the evening and 10 dB at night ("Lden" means "day-evening-night level", and is weighted to take into account the fact that night-time noise is more disturbing).
So this doesn't mean that the noise can be as high as 55 dB. It means that if you compare with what is measure against what you would expect if you took away all human activity, the human activity adds 55 dB... but on average. The peaks can be much, much higher.
55 dB(A) Lden is the threshold for excessive noise pollution in the EU. The WHO believes that this level causes serious disruption to sleep (a level of 40 db(A)Lnight is enough to do that) and associated health problems.
@@rewboss Thanks for ansering! But, be aware that the level you see for your recording is not the same dB as dBA. "A" means it is "overlaid" with the hearing curve of the human ear. While the other is in the power of the electrical microphone signal (in dBW) Your 0dB recording means the microphone signal has a power of 1W and you normalize it to 15 mW. As you are well spoken in german, maybe take a look at this site to see the difference in dB for noise and dB for electical power.: www.sengpielaudio.com/Rechner-pegelaenderung.htm
As far as i remember. things being quieter than 40 dB is not really achievable in the real world outside of deserts or when the whole area is covert in snow to dampen the noise.
(55 dBA even averaged out over the day is ridiculously low just for nature. Birds are much louder than that, if there's a tree near the measuring point and there's wind or rain you are much above that) Have you ever been to a noise canceling room (for lack of a better term). I mean a soundproof room with noise "eating" foam covered walls, roof and floor? I have, and as bad as it sounds, it is very uncomfortable on the ears. In this case i think EU officials have taken values scientists gave them and reduced them on their own, lacking of knowledge in the field.
And lastely as a little fun way of looking at noiselevels take a look at 6:23 here ua-cam.com/video/MpagMjUtDTg/v-deo.html
What will become of Lufthansa 707 (D-ABOC, "Berlin") that was restored and given to the city? It's ditched at the southwestern corner of Tegel field.
They won't use it so they're going to dispose it.
It was scrapped, just like the one in Hamburg :(
Tegel was a great airport. Fabulous schnellimbiss right outside the front door. Bus service to the door. Nowhere near as busy as other major city airports. What wasn’t to like?
Only bus connections, neither metro nor tram nor rail, i.e. the good transport modes. And waaaay too small, as has been pointed out, a lot.
@@varana Small enough to get around quickly. That suits many people. The bus connection which was regular took to you the nearest U Bahn station at Kurt Schumacher Platz which wasn’t far away. Not once did I get on a bus to or from Tegel where I couldn’t get a seat and I travelled to and from Berlin quite frequently.
I travelled not often through Tegel, the last time coming in from Barcelona in 2017. And when you came in from that busy international hub you became really the image of being landed on a small regional airport, something like Rostock-Laage or Saarbrücken - but a regional airport who was waaayyy much more crowded than this airports. I had to wait I think nearly two hours for my luggage, than sticking in the thick crowded area around the center. When I left the building just on the other side of the fence parked a 767 from MIAT Mongolian, you could nearly catch her with the hand. Ok - it seems to have been safe so. Than I sticked in a very large crowd waiting for the bus - and he does not come and he does not come and he does not come. When he finally arrived he was banged full in a few seconds with people and luggage - so I opted to wait for the next bus. Eventually I was on my way to the city and nearly missed than the station Kurt-Schumacher-Platz. It was something like a cave sprayed with graffiti and smelling of urine, I had to look a second time to identify it as a working station. When I finally arrived at the train station of Berlin-Spandau from where my connecting train went to Hamburg I felt like being back in civilization.
It was definetely not the greatest airport experience of my life. But Tegel-Airport has clearly a huge and important history. It had a real avant-garde architecture which was great in its time. It was for me - living nearby Hamburg - always much nearer as travelling through the whole city towards Schönefeld.
My personal conclusion remains ambivalent. If it should have stayed running as Germanies fourth-largest airport it would have needed a fundamental renovation.
Just imagine if the original Terminal B was built. Probably,still wouldn't have been enough
I hope that U-Bahn station gets built with the new university and residential development.
...it's a long way to BER.
But at least the train connection is quite good
I landed to this airport in 2019 and goodbye Tegel
the people living there will be very pleased that the noise is gone.
The people living near the new BER airport are certainly happy too.
I will remember Tegel more as the airport that broke my heart twice.
I want to the shop at that airport
Berlin has thus followed in the footsteps of Tokyo. Ask Tokyoites what they think of it...
(Hint: Narita airport is placed so far out that the _fastest_ express train to it from the _closest_ of the major Tokyo train stations takes an hour(!). You can get halfway to Nagoya in that time with the shinkansen.).
BER isn't that far out of the city center, it's more akin to JFK or LaGuardia, or LAX after LA finally extends the Metro to it. Also reminds me of that that massive, half-abandoned white elephant, Montreal-Mirabel. I think it at least gets some use as a UPS/FedEx hub.
This is why I always fly into Kansai and take the train to Tokyo. It’s just a bit longer than using the NEX but more convenient and you get nicer coffee too.
I actually hate to be at the plane directly after checkin. I also hate that duty free shops. Still, for comfort a short time between checkin and takeoff is really bad. If I'm flying for my job I always get rid of some overtime-hours just for lounges.
Moron. I was happy when I flew from Tegel.
I hated Tegel with a passion. It's the only airport I've ever flown to that's lost the same bag of mine twice. Both times having instead of putting it out for collection, taken it to the claim department. The flight lounge was pre security, so you checked in your bags, went to the lounge and had to fight your way back to the gate to go through security. Honestly it's the worst airport I've ever been to... that is until they opened BER. It looks like it was designed in the 1970's, doesn't have the facilities or capacity to cope and worst of all... no wait that's it.
RIP, Tegel. You will be missed.
A friend asked a german colleague why they don't reopen Tempelhof, and got the answer that "it's too much Hitler". I think that the germans will have to rethink Tempelhof once BBR hits its capacity ceiling.
Tempelhof is right in the middle of a residential district -- there are houses right at the end of its runways -- and can't handle modern jet airliners. That's why Tegel was opened to civilian traffic in the first place: Tempelhof was too small even in the 1960s.
The Kansas City airport KCI is similar to Tegel's design with a short walk from where a car would drop off a passenger to the gate. It was designed with the idea that a person could be dropped off by a taxi walk a short distance get on a plane and then pay for the ticket on the flight. Since airlines provided full meals passengers didn't need to eat at the airport. See this article in the Kansas City Star for more details www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article341740.html
Kansas City is building a new terminal.
Tegel was indeed built after the concept of a car-dominated city which was very popular in the 1960ies: you could reach or leave Tegel very well by car - ok, at least outside the rushhour ‐ but only by car. I think many airports built in this time - late 1960ies, early 1970ies - have the same design and I can very well imagine that it is in Kansas City, too. Two other aspects of this concept:
Tegel was far away from any railroad and the planned metroline was never built. Public transport played no role in the design of this airport - unthinkable today. The space for all the new security stuff introduced after 9/11 was pretty small - the phenomenon of terrorism wasn't anticipated when this airport was built - and I can imagine this is also the case in many similar airport designed and built in that time - I don't know how it is in Kansas City with this topics.
MCI is getting a new terminal, like SXF did. Kansas City is not getting a new airport.
berliners: hate to see you go🥺
everyone else: love to see you leave .😘
sorry, couldn't stop myself 😅
I wonder if the French also built it as a hexagon because they consider France to be a hexagonal shape.
No, it has nothing to do with that at all. The French did build a runway to help with the airlift, which was essentially a military operation. But they didn't have any part to play in the construction of the civilian airport, and the hexagonal terminal was designed by German architects working for a company based in Hamburg.
@@rewboss I see. Thanks for the explanation!
Ty so much for the interesting lesson! Why are here so few commwnts though qq
I had to deinstall Express VPN since I couldn't login at the Wifi system of the new airport. It's annoying.
I don't know why that should have happened. Was it not enough just to turn the VPN off?
So.. Because BER is in Brandenburg and TXL is closed the German capital has no more airport. 😂
Neither does the capital of Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Norway or the Netherlands. If I‘m not mistaken, even the United States capital technically doesn’t have an airport. So by your own logic Berlin is in great company 😉
The airport for Basel isn't even situated in Switzerland at all. You can find it in France (Mulhouse).
@@joshi1863 Woah, imagine an airport INSIDE Paris! Like, on the Champs-Elysées ?
Technically: yes. But Berlin shares 37% ownership of the airport company (another 37% Brandenburg and 26% the Federal Government).
@@ft4709 You are correct on the US's part! The Ronald Reagan "Washington" National Airport is actually in nearby Arlington, Virginia, not in Washington, DC. In other words, Berlin is in _very_ great company!
Funny, my old university is the one building its new campus there.
It isnt necessarily a bad idea to overrule referendums...especially stupid ones with a 52-48 result
Is "Germany" under national control? Are the things that happen in nations today a matter of sovereign or national power? Despite the darkness, you can hear and understand me, can't you?
Tempelhof has been converted into a motor racing venue. I think that alone makes it all with it
where is there a "motor racing venue" in tempelhof?
@@AlexanderGoeres just search "Berlin ePrix" on UA-cam
The E-Prix circuit is on the apron, and isn't permanent. The future use of the terminal building is still unclear, but most of the area, where the runways and taxiways were, are currently a park.
@@rewboss thanks for the info. Honestly, I can't imagine a nicer date for Tempelhof
Tempelhof is a museum now and the Fundburo.
The smartest thing to do in a global pandemic is to open an airport. Genius.
On Halloween
It is! it's an gentle start that allows teething problems to be fixed with minimal disruption.
It actually is because it's a chance to start slow with not so many flights and see how everything is holding up. Gives them a chance to improve things that do not work well while flights and passenger numbers are low. I think it's a good thing they started now.
Just to inform you, finishing this airport is like Godzilla attacks Tokio, both had the same chance :D
My job recently announced that we are no longer going to be closed overnight to deep clean anymore because obviously the pandemic is over.