Berlin Tegel Airport: architecture, history and closure

For many spotters, Tegel was the airport where it all began: a terrace on the roof, aircraft rolling up almost within arm’s reach of the hexagon, and a bus with three letters that half the city knew. For more than 70 years, Berlin Tegel Airport was first a Cold War stopgap, then an architectural icon and finally the symbol of an overloaded makeshift facility that had to hold out much longer than planned. This article tells the story of TXL – from the Airlift construction site through the gmp terminal to the last departure in November 2020 and the reuse of the site today.

Tegel at a glance

The airport was located in northwest Berlin, in the Reinickendorf district, and had the IATA code TXL and the ICAO code EDDT. Since 1988 its official name was Berlin-Tegel “Otto Lilienthal” Airport – named after the Berlin aviation pioneer to whom we have dedicated our own article about Otto Lilienthal. Two parallel east–west runways carried the traffic: the northern 08L/26R at 3,023 meters and the southern 08R/26L at about 2,428 meters, which dated back to the Airlift era.

Before the airport: airship troops and rockets

Long before scheduled jets took off there, the site in the Jungfernheide area was already linked to aviation. A Prussian airship battalion used the grounds in the early 20th century, and the first airship hangar was built in 1906. Starting September 27, 1930, a group around Rudolf Nebel tested liquid-fuel rockets on the so-called Raketenschießplatz Tegel (Tegel rocket test site) – an early chapter of space history set in the middle of Berlin. Tegel was not a commercial airport at that time, though; that role in Berlin belonged to Tempelhof Airport.

1948: an airfield in 90 days

The real moment of birth came during the Berlin Blockade. When the Soviet Union closed the land and water routes to West Berlin in June 1948, the Western Allies supplied the city by air. Tempelhof in the American sector and Gatow in the British sector were not enough for the enormous number of flights. So on August 5, 1948, construction of a third airfield began at Tegel, in the French sector.

The plan was 90 days – and the schedule held. At 2,428 meters, the new runway was the longest in Europe at the time. On November 5, 1948, the first aircraft landed, a Douglas C-54 of the Airlift. How this supply operation worked overall, how many flights a day it took and why it became the founding myth of West Berlin is described in our article on the Berlin Airlift. You can still see traces of that era today at the Military History Museum Berlin-Gatow airfield, the city’s other Airlift airfield.

After the end of the blockade, Tegel initially remained a military airfield under French administration. Civil traffic hardly played a role at first.

From military airfield to civil airport

Air France leads the way

In early January 1960, Air France started scheduled service from Tegel and thus became the first civil airline at the airport. That fit the logic of the division: Tegel was in the French sector, and the French airline used “its” airfield. From April 1968, charter airlines also moved their flights from Tempelhof to Tegel, because the runways at Tempelhof were too short for larger jets and the inner-city airport was cramped.

Allied rules in the airspace

Until 1990, a special regime applied to Berlin traffic: only airlines based in the USA, Great Britain or France were allowed to fly through the three air corridors between West Berlin and West Germany, and the cockpit crews had to hold passports of those countries. Lufthansa was thus shut out. Domestic German traffic to and from Berlin was carried mainly by Pan Am and British Airways, plus charter airlines such as the British Dan-Air. Anyone standing at Tegel back then saw plenty of Boeing 727s and short-haul jets in British and American colors – while the aircraft of Interflug were to be seen only on the other side of the Wall, at Schönefeld.

On September 1, 1975, Pan Am and British Airways moved their entire Berlin operations from Tempelhof to Tegel. That made Tegel the main airport of West Berlin for good.

The hexagon: architecture by gmp

A young firm and a radical idea

The growing traffic called for a new terminal at Tegel. The commission went to the Hamburg firm von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) around Meinhard von Gerkan and Volkwin Marg – then still young architects for whom Tegel became the breakthrough. The Tegel-Süd complex was planned from the mid-1960s, construction began in 1970 and the topping-out ceremony was held in 1972. The main building was officially inaugurated on October 23, 1974, and went into operation on November 1, 1974. The costs were around 430 million Deutsche Marks.

Von Gerkan’s guiding idea could hardly have been simpler: the way from the entrance to the aircraft should be as short as possible. The result was the famous Terminal A:

• Hexagonal ring: The terminal enclosed an inner courtyard where cars, taxis and buses pulled up. The aircraft docked on the outside of the ring.
• 14 jet bridges: Each bridge had its own check-in area directly behind it. Check-in, security screening and boarding followed one another within a very small space.
• Short distances: Between the drive-up zone and the aircraft it was often only about 30 meters. For an airport of this size, those were exceptionally short walks.
• Strict grid: The entire design was built on triangles and hexagons. The geometry ran from the basic shape down to details such as ceilings and light fixtures.
• Roof terrace: On the roof of the ring there was an observation deck – for generations of Berlin spotters the first front-row seat at the apron.

The downside of the concept

What was brilliant in 1974 later became a problem. Because there was a small security checkpoint behind every gate, there was no continuous transit zone. Connecting without leaving the security area was practically impossible, and the concept was unsuited to a hub. The capacity was originally designed for around 2.5 million passengers per year. Later figures cite an expanded capacity of roughly 11.5 to 12 million – and even that was far beyond what Tegel could handle in the end.

The airport complex has been a protected monument since April 2019. Today the hexagon is regarded as one of the most important structures of German postwar modernism in transport architecture. Incidentally, gmp also planned the successor decades later: Berlin Brandenburg Airport.

After the fall of the Wall: growth without end

Lufthansa comes to Berlin

With reunification, the Allied restrictions fell away. On October 28, 1990, Lufthansa started scheduled service to Berlin, launching with twelve daily flights. The French armed forces withdrew in 1994. The northern part of the site remained in use afterward as a government and military airfield, including for the helicopters of the Flugbereitschaft (the German government’s air transport wing).

Extensions, containers and bus gates

Passenger numbers grew steadily – from 6.7 million in 1991 to over 24 million in 2019. To handle the traffic at all, Tegel grew through makeshift additions:

• Terminal D was created in 2001 in a converted parking garage.
• Terminal C opened on May 24, 2007 as a lightweight structure, with extensions in 2009 and 2011.
• Terminal E was an area on the ground floor with additional gates.

The original principle of short walking distances no longer applied in the extensions. Bus gates, cramped waiting areas and long lines shaped everyday life in the final years. In a 2018 study, Tegel ranked among the worst airports in the world.

Air Berlin and the hub years

For a long time the most important customer was Air Berlin, which also flew long-haul routes from Tegel – despite a terminal concept ill suited to connecting passengers. With the insolvency and the end of flight operations in 2017, the airport lost its biggest user. The airline’s whole story is told in our article Air Berlin: rise and fall.

Noise, buses and a referendum

Tegel lay in the middle of the city, and the approaches led over densely populated districts. According to noise studies, around 240,000 people were exposed to daytime levels above 55 dB(A), along with numerous schools and hospitals. As the number of flights rose, so did night traffic.

Tegel never had a rail connection. There were plans for a subway link, but it was never built. The main burden was carried by the TXL express bus, plus other BVG lines – when there were disruptions, travelers were stuck in traffic for a long time.

Despite everything, many Berliners were attached to their airport. In September 2017, a majority voted in a referendum held alongside the federal election in favor of keeping it open alongside the new BER. The vote was not implemented: the airport’s shareholders – the federal government, Berlin and Brandenburg – stuck to the closure.

The long goodbye

Originally Tegel was to close in June 2012, as soon as the new capital airport opened. Construction problems at BER pushed the date back again and again – by more than eight years in total. During that time, Tegel had to operate far beyond its limits.

On October 31, 2020, BER finally opened, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the airlines moved within a few days. Lufthansa said goodbye with an Airbus A350-900 to Munich. The very last scheduled flight went on November 8, 2020 to the airline with which it had all begun: Air France AF1235, an Airbus A320 with the registration F-GKXP, took off for Paris-Charles de Gaulle at 3:39 p.m.

For legal and safety reasons, the airport then remained operational for another six months. On May 4, 2021, the operating license expired, after which the site was formally decommissioned as an airport.

Date	Event
1906	First airship hangar on the site
September 27, 1930	Start of the Tegel rocket test site
August 5, 1948	Construction of the airfield for the Airlift begins
November 5, 1948	First landing of a Douglas C-54
January 1960	Air France starts scheduled service
November 1, 1974	Opening of the hexagonal terminal
September 1, 1975	Pan Am and British Airways move from Tempelhof to Tegel
1988	Named after Otto Lilienthal
October 28, 1990	Lufthansa starts scheduled service to Berlin
May 24, 2007	Opening of Terminal C
April 2019	Heritage protection for the airport complex
2019	Record year with around 24.2 million passengers
November 8, 2020	Last scheduled flight: Air France AF1235 to Paris
May 4, 2021	End of the operating license

Accidents and the Cold War

Accidents are also part of the airfield’s history: in July 1949, a Royal Air Force Handley Page Hastings crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all five crew members. In November 1966, a Pan Am Boeing 727 on a cargo flight crashed on approach to Tegel over East German territory near Dallgow, and all three crew members died.

The Cold War showed itself in other ways too: between 1969 and 1982, several hijackings of Polish LOT domestic flights ended at Tegel, because the hijackers could seek asylum in West Berlin. In these cases the French military authorities, who administered the airfield, were responsible.

Tegel after flight operations

Instead of jets, the site now sees excavators and construction sites. Under the name Berlin TXL, the former airport is being redeveloped across roughly 500 hectares:

• Urban Tech Republic: A campus for research, industry and start-ups focused on urban technologies. Since July 2026, Terminal A has been converted into a campus of the Berlin University of Applied Sciences and Technology; according to current planning, the main construction work will not be finished until the 2030s.
• Schumacher Quartier: A new residential district with more than 5,000 apartments for over 10,000 people.
• Tegeler Stadtheide: A large landscape area that will be preserved as a natural and landscape space.

Until the redevelopment gets that far, the site served other purposes: a vaccination center ran in Terminal C from February 2021 to May 2022, and since March 2022 parts of the former terminals have been used as an arrival center for refugees. The Flugbereitschaft long continued to use the military northern part for helicopters; they moved to BER in October 2025. How the areas will develop in detail depends on plans that keep getting postponed – as of October 2026, the conversion is far from complete.

What spotters make of Tegel today

You can’t fly at Tegel anymore, but you can certainly experience aviation history. Three approaches are worthwhile:

Anyone who experienced Tegel can also see in hindsight how much the fleets have changed: from the Boeing 727 and the BAC One-Eleven of the Allied era through the Boeing 737-300 of the nineties to the Airbus fleets of the last few years, the airport mirrors half a century of European short-haul flying. For an overview of the airport’s profile, see the page on Berlin Tegel Airport.

Conclusion

Tegel was an airport with three lives: as an emergency construction site of the Airlift, as an architectural milestone of the 1970s and as an overloaded makeshift facility that, because of the BER delays, had to hold out eight years longer than planned. The gmp hexagon showed how elegant a terminal can be when short walking distances are the measure of all things – and at the same time how quickly a concept hits its limits when traffic grows tenfold. Today the terminal is a protected monument, and a new city district is growing on the site.