Berlin Brandenburg Airport

No German airport has waited as long for its opening as BER – and hardly any is as versatile on a small scale for spotters. No A380 fleets or cargo giants land at the capital airport every few minutes. Instead, you see a colorful mix here of low-cost jets, network airlines from all over Europe, guests from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, a few rare long-haul flights – and the aircraft of the federal government. If you know how the two runways, the new numbering and the observation deck work together, you’ll make much better use of a visit.

From the Henschel plant to the capital airport

The history of the site is older than BER itself. In 1934, construction of the Henschel aircraft works began at Schönefeld, after the war Soviet air forces took over the site, and in 1947 the Soviet military administration ordered a civilian airport there. In East Germany, Schönefeld was expanded into the central airport and was the home of Interflug. After reunification, Berlin suddenly had three airports – Tegel, Tempelhof and Schönefeld – and the question of what a joint capital airport might look like.

The answer was Schönefeld. Construction work began in 2006, and in 2008 construction of the main terminal. The opening date was initially October 2011, then June 3, 2012. About four weeks before that date came the cancellation: the fire protection system didn’t work as required. What followed is material for textbooks on megaprojects – defects in the building systems, replanning, changes in management and a cost frame that, by a 2018 estimate, stood at around 7.3 billion euros.

On October 31, 2020, the time had finally come. In the middle of the pandemic, BER began operations, and by November 8 all airlines had moved over from Tegel. The old Schönefeld terminal building briefly continued as Terminal 5, was shut down temporarily in February 2021 and for good in November 2022. The airport is named after the former Federal Chancellor and Governing Mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt.

Two runways, one terminal in between

The layout is quickly understood. Two parallel runways run east–west, with Terminal 1 with main, north and south piers and the aprons in between. The north runway is the former runway of Schönefeld Airport, which was extended to 3,600 meters in 2012. The south runway, at 4,000 meters, is the longer one and was newly built for BER. Both runways are far enough apart to be operated independently of each other.

Important for everyone planning with older spotter guides or maps: since October 3, 2024, the runways carry new numbers. Because the Earth’s magnetic field has shifted, 07L/25R became today’s 06L/24R and 07R/25L became 06R/24L. Nothing has changed about position and flight paths. Why runways carry numbers at all is explained in the article Runway designations at airports.

Spotter guides pass on a useful rule of thumb, citing air traffic control: landing aircraft mostly use the runway that is closer to their later parking position. So if you know where a flight is handled, you can roughly estimate which side it touches down on. Deviations for operational reasons are possible at any time – a look at a flight tracker is more reliable. How that works is shown in the article on flight tracking with ADS-B.

Runway direction in use: 24 or 06?

Aircraft take off and land into the wind. With a west wind, all movements run in direction 24 – aircraft approach from the east and take off to the west. With an east wind the picture flips, and runway direction 06 is in use. Because westerly weather patterns dominate in Germany, direction 24 is also usually active at BER.

That has clear consequences for you. At the observation deck, you see traffic in both directions because the apron is always busy. But if you want to go to a runway end, the runway direction in use decides whether you have landings directly above you or only departing aircraft in the distance. The basics are in the article Understanding the runway direction at airports.

Who flies at BER

BER is not a hub but a point-to-point airport. Low-cost airlines recently had the largest share of passenger volume: in 2023, Ryanair and easyJet led, followed by Lufthansa, Eurowings, Turkish Airlines and other network airlines. The most-flown routes in 2025 included Frankfurt, Munich, Palma de Mallorca, Zurich, Antalya and Vienna – that is, the feeders to the big hubs and classic vacation destinations.

For your type list, that means: the bulk of your sightings are narrowbody aircraft. The A320 family with the A320, A320neo and A321neo meets the Boeing 737-800 and the 737 MAX 8. In between, regional aircraft and the Airbus A220-300 show up, for example at airBaltic. Especially for beginners, BER is thus a good training ground for learning to tell Airbus and Boeing apart.

Bases and terminals

According to airport overviews, easyJet, Eurowings, Condor and Sundair, among others, have aircraft based in Berlin. Terminal 2, which only opened with the 2022 summer schedule, is used mainly by Wizz Air and, until now, Ryanair. All others are handled in Terminal 1.

Long-haul: few but coveted flights

Widebody aircraft are the exception at BER on a normal day – and that is exactly why they are coveted. According to schedule overviews (as of October 2026), the intercontinental connections include Qatar Airways to Doha, United Airlines to Newark and Hainan Airlines to Beijing. Seasonally, Delta to New York, Air Canada to Montréal and Air Transat to Toronto are added. Which types are used depends on the respective schedule.

One gap is immediately noticeable to connoisseurs: Emirates does not fly to Berlin. The air services agreement between Germany and the United Arab Emirates limits how many German cities the airline may serve; an expansion was negotiated, but Berlin is not included so far. To get to Dubai from here, you can fly with Eurowings and, seasonally, Condor, among others. The picture is completed by airlines from the Middle East and Eastern Europe that you see less often at western German airports.

Government airport: the Flugbereitschaft

What makes BER special is politics. The Flugbereitschaft of the Federal Ministry of Defense (the German government’s air transport unit) has used its own site with an interim terminal for government flights since 2020. In October 2025, the Flugbereitschaft’s helicopter squadron also moved from Tegel to BER. By current plans, the permanent expansion with hangars and apron drags on into the 2030s; the final government terminal is now not planned until 2035.

For spotters, that means: chancellor, minister and president flights land here, plus state guests from all over the world. With some luck, you catch an Airbus A350 of the Flugbereitschaft in government colors or a foreign government aircraft on a state visit. There are of course no fixed schedules, and for security reasons the procedures are not public. How to plan for such flights anyway and where the legal limits of photography lie is described in the article Spotting government aircraft.

Spotting at BER: deck and runway ends

The official and most convenient spot is the observation deck on the roof of Terminal 1. According to the airport, it lies outside the security area, is open daily from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and costs 3 euros for a fixed time slot of 90 minutes. From above, you look over a large part of the passenger apron: docking, handling, pushback and taxiing. The two runways lie to the left and right at a greater distance – for takeoffs and landings, you need a lot of focal length. You’ll find all details on access, light and equipment in the spot guide to the observation deck at Berlin Airport.

If you want frame-filling pictures of takeoffs and landings, move on after the deck. Spotters use public paths, hills and field edges at the runway ends, for example near Selchow and Waßmannsdorf, as well as the parking garage deck between P7 and P8. These points have no infrastructure, are mostly reachable only by car or bike and work very differently well depending on the runway direction in use. Stick to public areas there, don’t block access roads and leave drones at home – the entire surroundings lie in a control zone.

Daily rhythm and night quiet hours

Flights operate at BER from 5:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. There are no regular takeoffs and landings between midnight and 5 a.m.; exceptions apply to government, military, rescue and emergency flights. Additional noise protection restrictions apply in the fringe hours late in the evening and early in the morning. The article on night flight bans at German airports offers a comparison with other airports.

For your planning, that means: you won’t catch the first departure wave early in the morning, when the based aircraft of easyJet, Eurowings and others take off, from the deck because it only opens at 8 a.m. At the runway ends, on the other hand, early morning is especially worthwhile. During the day, traffic is spread more evenly than at a hub; in the evening, the based aircraft return.

Cargo and expansion

Cargo plays a smaller role at BER than in Frankfurt or Leipzig. In 2025, the airport handled just under 52,000 tonnes. Most of it flies in the belly of passenger aircraft; added to that are feeder flights by integrators such as FedEx and UPS. If you want to see pure freighters in large numbers, you’re better off at Leipzig/Halle Airport, which is not far away.

For expansion, the airport company thinks in terminals rather than runways. According to the expansion plan, a Terminal 3 for several million additional passengers is planned east of the existing buildings, possibly a Terminal 4 later. The two existing runways are, on paper, sufficient for up to around 45 million passengers per year; a third runway in the south is considered at most a long-term possibility, and there are no concrete plans for it. With around 26 million passengers in 2025, there is still room until then.

BER in comparison

With around 26 million passengers, BER ranks third in Germany behind Frankfurt Airport and Munich Airport. Unlike those two, however, it is not a connecting hub of the Lufthansa Group; the group airlines bring their Berlin passengers mainly to the hubs in Frankfurt, Munich, Zurich and Vienna. If you’re looking for A380s and A350s in high density, go to Munich or Frankfurt. If, on the other hand, you want to collect as many different airlines as possible, BER is the right place.

Smaller but with a similar point-to-point profile is Hamburg Airport: with its city location and the well-known spotter spot at the Affenfelsen. For your first tour, the article Plane spotting for beginners and the gear checklist also help.

Conclusion

BER has an eventful backstory but is an uncomplicated airport in everyday life: two parallel runways, a terminal in the middle, a train station directly beneath it and an official deck above the apron. Its strength is not the size of the aircraft but the variety of airlines – from the low-cost jet to guests from Eastern Europe and the Middle East to the government aircraft.

If you know the new runway numbers, check the runway direction in use beforehand and pick out the few long-haul flights on the arrivals boards, you get a lot more out of a day at Schönefeld. And if you take in the runway ends as well as the deck, you get the pictures that don’t work from above.