Mother Of All Airports Faces Uncertain Future

[Guest Chainsaw]

August 4, 2006

 

A vast open space almost the size of New York's Central Park, complete with one of the world's biggest buildings, might be a sought-after asset in the heart of any other metropolis.

 

But in Berlin, a city where space is plentiful and property cheap by European standards, the huge Tempelhof airport with its imposing terminal threatens to pose a problem for city authorities when it is closed to air traffic next year.

 

No one seems to know what to do with the giant, outdated site which holds a special place in Berliners' hearts: it was here that Allied Dakotas and Skymasters landed every few minutes in 1948 and 1949 to supply the city during the Soviet blockade.

 

"I can already see the locals, standing in front of the fences the day the airport closes, pulling out their bolt cutters and taking over the land," Green party councillor Elisabeth Ziemer told a recent seminar on the airport's future.

 

"Then we are going to have exactly what we don't want: illegal car races and land to walk your dog on".

 

The question of what to do with Tempelhof when the few flights it still deals with are redirected next year ahead of the opening of a new city airport is complicated by its historical and architectural significance.

 

Dubbed the "mother of all airports" by architect Sir Norman Foster, the neoclassical terminal was designed by Ernst Sagebiel and built between 1936 and 1941 by forced laborers in the monolithic style preferred by Hitler.

 

Some 1.2 km in length, the limestone building is flanked by crescent-shaped hangars which follow the curve of the oval airfield. The terminal roof was intended as a viewing platform, with capacity for 100,000 people.

 

A glass canopy was designed to allow jets to pull up to the building, out of the rain, but modern jumbos are too big to fit under it or to use the relatively short runways.

 

It's a long way from the airport's glory days in the late 1940s when its runways literally kept the city alive.

 

"This is a monument to the Nazis, to the blockade and the airlift and it is also a symbol as a point of departure from West Berlin," said art historian Gabi Dolff-Bonekaemper.

 

At the end of World War Two, the half-finished airport was eventually taken over by the Allied American forces.

 

In 1948, Soviet authorities cut off all roads to West Berlin in a bid to gain dominance in an Allied-administered enclave surrounded by Soviet-controlled eastern Germany.

 

Starting in June 1948, nearly 300,000 flights by American, French and British forces brought over 2 million tonnes of food, coal, sweets and other provisions to the blockaded city.

 

Josef Stalin called off the blockade in 1949.

 

Now, city authorities are canvassing opinion to decide what to do with Tempelhof: so far suggestions include using part of the airfield as a golf course or moving government departments or even a hotel or university into the terminal building.

 

Planners have also suggested leaving the airfield intact, opening parts of it up for leisure activities and protecting the rest of the vegetation as a "lung" to provide fresh air.

 

Wackier ideas from residents included turning the building's roof into a huge solar panel to provide electricity.

 

"It is right and important that after 10 years (of talk) we try to make concrete... what comes after the closure, what we will do and how we will use the site," said Ingeborg Junge Reyer, responsible for Berlin's city development.

 

A new Berlin airport is due to open in 2011 at the Schoenefeld site -- the dilapidated old airport of East Berlin.

 

The site will consolidate three existing airports into a single hub, making Tempelhof and its international cousin Tegel obsolete.

 

Tempelhof already feels like a relic: many of the terminal fittings seem unchanged from the 1930s, creating a retro feel in line with current trends in style-conscious Berlin.

 

Tapping into the airport's timeless atmosphere, a theatre group is staging a play set in 1978 about the hijacking of a Polish jet in the under-utilized departure lounge.

 

Cash-strapped Berlin wants to close Tempelhof to staunch its losses, which ran to EUR9 million (USD$11.5 million) in 2005.

 

However, the airport's avid supporters say traffic has picked up in recent years and that during the soccer World Cup, it was an important hub for private and corporate jets.

 

They argue that the airport should be maintained so that it could be returned to active service, if, for instance, Berlin were to launch a bid for the 2016 Olympics.

 

Some of the few passengers still wandering the cool, linoleum-lined corridors would like that. Flights from the airport mainly service other German cities.

 

"I can fly here direct from Friedrichshafen and point-to-point it is very good," said Georg Rayczyk, an air industry executive from near Lake Constance in southern Germany.

 

"It will be a shame if it closes," the regular Tempelhof user said. "Perhaps passengers don't appreciate it these days, but it was an innovative airport in its time."

 

(Reuters)

 

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