GERMANY. Berlin Brandenburg Airport Willy Brandt opened for operations today (31 October) as the first flights from easyJet and Lufthansa landed at the new Terminal 1.
The first passengers, including easyJet CEO Johan Lundgren and Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, were welcomed in Terminal 1 by the head of the airport company, Engelbert Lütke Daldrup.
With the opening of the new airport serving the German capital, all flight operations will be concentrated at a single location. Schönefeld Airport becomes Berlin Brandenburg Terminal 5, while Berlin Tegel will close from 7 November.
As reported, T1 houses more than 20,000sq m of commercial space. The heart of this is a 9,000sq m marketplace airside, with 2,000sq m allocated to F&B, featuring a strong flavour of the Berlin region. In the T1 non-Schengen area, around 1,400sq m is allocated to retail, restaurants and services. Landside, commercial accounts for around 4,000sq m of space. Gebr Heinemann is the main travel retailer at the location.
The airport covers a total area of 1,470 hectares, the equivalent of around 2,000 football pitches. Terminals 1 and 2 are located between the two parallel runways, while Terminal 5 (the former Schönefeld Airport), is in the northern area.
The airport can handle over 40 million passengers with Terminal 1 capacity at around 25 million.
Airport CEO Engelbert Lütke Daldrup said: “With Berlin Brandenburg Airport Willy Brandt, eastern Germany can now rely on airport infrastructure that will serve as a solid basis for the coming decades. The people here in the German capital region had to wait a long time for this day.
“Our customers, that is the passengers and airlines, will find professional standards at BER: good accessibility by train and car, reliability and safety in handling even under Coronavirus conditions, optimal service on the ground and in the air. I am very pleased that we were able to open the new airport with easyJet and Lufthansa. They are our most important partners even in these difficult times. Together, we shall overcome this crisis.”
