News: New Berlin airport gets underway
Flights > News > # 989 (15/09/2006)
Construction has started on an ambitious new international airport in Berlin.
The German capital currently has three international airports, Schonefeld, Tegel and Tempelhof, which will be replaced by the new Brandenburg International facility. The €1.8 billion (£1.2 billion) project involves constructing a state-of-the-art glass and steel terminal and two new runways on the site of Schonefeld. The airport will have a dedicated new station under the terminal building, which will provide high-speed rail connections to the centre of Berlin and numerous other cities in the Brandenburg region, as well as further a field in Germany and neighbouring Poland.
The new airport marks a further chapter in the renaissance of Berlin since reunification in 1991. The city has been an important crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe for centuries, and has seen a huge surge in passenger numbers over the last 15 years.
However, not everyone is happy. In addition to local opposition groups concerned about the environmental and noise impact further expansion will have, many no-frills airlines who currently operate cheap flights to Berlin fear they will end up paying for the construction costs through increased landing fees and handling charges.
Speaking at the world's low-cost airline's conference earlier this week, the former chief executive of German budget airline HLX Express, Wolfgang Kursth, said the airport had not been designed with no-frills airlines in mind despite the fact that budget carriers account for 55% of Berlin’s passenger traffic.
“Brandenburg will not become a major hub, and no-frills airlines do not want facilities which were designed in the 1990s for a very different aviation industry. The terminal plan design dates back to a time when no-frills airlines had not entered the scene. No-frills airlines do not want marble plated terminals, and there is already a perfectly adequate terminal on this site,” Kursth said.
The budget airline Easyjet, who are one of most important tenants at the existing Schonefeld airport, are also known to very unhappy about the Brandenburg project. Berlin, which is home to eight Easyjet aircraft, is the airline's largest base outside the UK.
A spokesperson for the Berlin Airports Authority defended the new airport, saying that a number of modifications had been made to the terminal design in order to accommodate the no-frills airlines, including two separate piers for low-cost airlines. He said:
“We have to build a 21st century airport which is suitable for the needs of the German capital, but we are very well aware that we must also cater for the needs of the no-frills airlines. But we are not like some small provincial city in France, where airlines can bully the airport into getting whatever they want."
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Comment:
Berlin has seen no shortage of exciting new construction projects lately, with much of this boom benefiting from the huge amount of land which was made available after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin's urban transport network was severed in two during the Cold War era, and a North-South rail link has now been opened up, connecting the vast Potsdammer Platz redevelopment with the huge new central station (Hauptbanhof).
The whole idea of the Brandenburg International airport is to provide a centralised integrated facility which links into all of the new developments which have been taking place in the centre of Berlin. The high-speed railway station on site will also bring the new Berlin airport to within 90 minutes of other major German cities such as Hamburg and Hanover.
In theory, this sounds like a great idea. However, Berlin will need to see a huge expansion in passenger numbers in order to meet the costs of such an expensive project. This is unlikely to happen because Germany’s key hub is already well established at Frankfurt, and the national carrier Lufthansa is also developing a substantial secondary base in Munich. Frankfurt benefits from its position as one of the world’s leading finance centres and its proximity to the Rhine-Ruhr region, which is home to over ten million people. Berlin certainly doesn’t have such a cache.
Without Lufthansa on board, and with fierce competition from Frankfurt and Munich, especially on lucrative business and long-haul flights, Brandenburg will have to look towards the no-frills airlines for business. One thing is for sure, budget giants such as Easyjet and Ryanair are not going to pay the increased fees and charges – they’ll simply go elsewhere.
One potentially interesting argument in favour of the Brandenburg project is that Berlin is one hour's flying time closer to Asia, and that this seemingly small point could actually be hugely attractive for airlines, because this would enable them to make their German routes significantly more efficient. However, flights to Asia would only be a very small proportion of Berlin's portfolio, as it is looking increasingly unlikely that Lufthansa would want to develop any kind of major hub operation in Berlin. It is also worth noting that whilst Berlin may be an hour closer to Asia, it is an hour further away from Western Europe and North America.
High-quality transport facilities can do a great deal to boost the ego of politicians, and this is always going to be a more prominent feature of airports serving capital cities, even if they are not actually major airline hubs. Such extravagance can just about be justified in a country where the capital dominates, such as Britain or France, but is a mighty risk in Germany, where there are five or six cities all vying to be top dog.
If local politicians want expensive airport facilities, then they will have to ensure that they provide the funding, as airlines are becoming increasingly reluctant to pay inflated costs to use them. A major transfer hub like Heathrow can offset the construction costs of a swanky new terminal through duty-free retail and hotels, but is going to be much harder to do at Brandenburg; which is, in aviation terms at least, nothing more than a medium-sized regional airport.
