FLUG REVUE August 2004: Tempelhof to close in October

TEMPELHOF TO CLOSE

By Sebastian Steinke

Tempelhof airport, rich in tradition, is a place of superlatives: its quadrant-shaped building façade along the north-west apron extends for an amazing 1.2 kilometres. The avant-garde, steel roof on this building, known as the “concourse”, stretches forward a bold 40 metres over the aircraft on the ramp below it without supports and shields the passengers from wind and weather. At the same time, like a stand in a stadium, the roof surface was intended to accommodate up to 65,000 air display spectators, who would climb up massive stairwell towers which, in the event, were never used. The yellowish shell limestone façades of Tempelhof enclose a building complex that contains some 240,000 square metres of usable floorspace. The oval airport grounds, in a prime position on the southern edge of the Berlin inner-city, extend over 420 hectares.

Tempelhof aproon

Originally conceived in 1934 to be a part of the megalomaniac, warped Nazi world capital city of “Germania”, the biggest airport in the world of its time soon became the object of parody, being likened to a “clothes hanger”. Yet one cannot deny that the design language developed by Ernst Sagebiel has a surprisingly sober, functional elegance. The almost solemn mood in the 120 metre long, 40 metre wide railway station-like reception hall alone has transported many a passenger into joyful excitement in anticipation of their forthcoming journey.

But Tempelhof, which by the end of the war was little more than a ravaged shell out of reinforced concrete, conquered the hearts of Berliners not on account of any aesthetically packaged gigantism, but because of the crucial role it played in the Allied airlift during the blockade of the winter of 1948/49. At that time, the Soviet Union temporarily blocked off all land access to the western sectors of this city ruled by the Four Powers, whereupon the British and Americans between them ensured that the city was kept supplied with provisions by air.

Later on, the initially totally oversized airport was able, thanks to its size, to handle the booming air traffic of the post-war era, until relations between the two German states thawed sufficiently in the 1970s to make road travel a lot easier. As a result, the number of passengers using the “central airport” dropped dramatically. The extension to Tegel that was once planned due to inadequate capacity was then redesignated to the status of sole diversion airport.

Since then, the subject of Tempelhof has always been associated with a certain melancholy, but after the charter traffic was moved to Tegel North in 1968 and all traffic was relocated to the new Tegel South terminal in September 1975, the airport played only a secondary role in the Berlin airport system. The Allied nations' own airlines were initially reluctant to move into the new premises at Tegel and had to be persuaded to leave Tempelhof with financial sweeteners.

Then, with the advent of Berlinair Inc. in 1977 and Tempelhof Airways USA in 1982, air taxi, ambulance and regional transport gradually established fledgling roots in the buildings now almost devoid of humans, whose only other resident was the US military, including the Allied Berlin Air Route Traffic Control Centre (BARTCC). Until the Berlin Wall came down, a kind of Cinderella-like slumber reigned in the tradition-steeped location.

With the tough restrictions of the era in which Berlin was governed by the Allies now gone, new regional flight connections sprang up in great numbers at this airport so close to the heart of the new capital city. Whereas the Luftwaffe and the Federal Border Police soon gave up the noise-sensitive inner-city airport after a ban was introduced on civilian nocturnal flights, General Aviation blossomed at EDDI (the ICAO code for Tempelhof). Not an afternoon goes by without a sizeable proportion of the German management elite gliding in by private jet above the convenient city airport in the German capital city. Meanwhile more and more regional jets from ATR, Embraer, Saab, Fokker & Co. are taxiing their way to the runway, giving off the familiar engine drone that produces a characteristic echo in the curved building façade.

For some years SN Brussels Airlines, which operates a service to the Belgian capital by Avro regional jet, has been the token airline in Tempelhof and an especially passionate fan of the location. The airport is also used by medium-sized aircraft dealers and aircraft maintenance centres like Beechcraft, charter operators like Windrose Air and even flying schools, generating jobs and tax revenues.

But the company which operates all Berlin's airports and its parent company, Berlin Brandenburg Flughafen Holding, viewed Tempelhof's revival with scepticism from the start. As long as the facilities in Tegel were not yet fully utilised, they were nurturing in “THF” (IATA code) a rival to Tegel in their own backyard. At the same time, the development site of Schoenefeld, which had been taken over from the GDR, was suffering from lack of utilisation and acceptance, at any rate until the low-cost airlines discovered it.

It was suggested that the best option was to relinquish Tempelhof's modest total revenue to “SXF”, in support of the strategy decided by a consensual resolution in 1996 by the Federal government, the state of Brandenburg and the state of Berlin to establish a single Berlin-Brandenburg International (BBI) airport in Schoenefeld, which for its part should benefit from the hoped-for, but so far failed privatisation. There was therefore never any talk of transforming Tempelhof to the promising model of the new London City airport.

According to airport chief executive Dieter Johannsen-Roth, commenting on the falling passenger numbers in Tempelhof to FLUG REVUE, “The market turned its back on Tempelhof some time ago.” The Berlin airport company is keen to get out of Tempelhof, and justifies this by the losses it is making. Berlin's Governing Mayor, Klaus Wowereit, estimated at the beginning of June that between 1991 and 2003 the airport had lost Euro139 million, Euro15.3 million of which occurred in the last year alone.

For the capital city which has run up enormous debts since the dramatic cutbacks in state subsidies following reunification, Tempelhof is just one cost factor too many and is standing in the way of the rapid implementation of BBI, whose two future runways (with independent parallel and 24 hour operation) are supposed to replace the capacity of the four runways that Tempelhof and Tegel have between them.

Critics accuse the airport company of deliberately distorting Tempelhof's losses. Thus, it is said that the “losses” include bookkeeping losses in respect of parts of buildings that are unoccupied but which to this day have never even been completed beyond the shell and have never actively been marketed. Also, they argue, only a small part of the massive space of Tempelhof is actually needed for present flying operations, which on its own contributes far less to the overall deficits and has not canvassed for new customers for years. Besides, only Tegel is making a profit; pampered Schoenefeld is also in the red.

In actual fact the question arises whether the Tempelhof buildings, which are under a architectural preservation order and would therefore be difficult to convert to other purposes, would actually be more “profitable” if flying operations were to be terminated altogether, in view of the magnetic effect which the airport has on customers and jobs. For, it seems that the Berlin state, stricken as it is by financial plight, is attracted by the thought that, whereas up to now Tempelhof's losses have been borne jointly by the federal government and the state, if it is closed and Berlin ceases to be involved, then in the long term the losses will have to be picked up by the federal government alone, irrespective of how big they are.

Until then there is another legal possibility. The state air traffic control authorities having acceded to the airport company's application for closure on 2 June and ordered its “immediate enforcement”, the airport could be closed at midnight on 31 October. However, so far no formal public planning decision has been issued for the alternative BBI location, once referred to as the “large airport” and today the “sole airport”, which is supposed to open in 2010. Yet the closure of Tempelhof should really be tied in with this event. Once the BBI formal public planning decision has finally been issued, no doubt time-consuming objections will be raised against it before it becomes set in legislation. Until then, the Tempelhof contracts of the present users will most likely remain in place.

Meanwhile the airlines that serve Tempelhof have announced that they plan to appeal the immediate enforcement of the closure order before the Higher Administrative Court, which could well delay the closure until at least 2005. Even the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry, despite being in favour of building BBI, has described the plans to close Tempelhof as a “mistake” and reckons that the appeal has a good chance of success. Moreover, several airlines, among them dba and Germania, who are supported in this matter by Windrose Air, have offered, if necessary, to fund their continued operations in Tempelhof from their own pockets.

Unless it is handed over to a private operator after it is closed, the airport, whose substance is protected as a listed building, would be left to an uncertain fate. The rock-bottom property prices and rents in Berlin and the lack of grants preclude the development of the vast open space, which would otherwise probably be turned into a kind of park. As far as the existing buildings are concerned, the federal government is considering moving parts of the Defence Ministry, the Federal Intelligence Service or the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation into them. The German television channel, ZDF, could base a new series of its gameshow, “What do you bet?” in one of the huge hangars. What do you bet that Tempelhof is given another reprieve?

From page 62 of FLUG REVUE 8/2004

Last updated 8 July 2004

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