On August 10, 1930, the airship Graf Zeppelin came down at Dortmund’s airport, and 120,000 people turned out to watch. You cannot go and stand on that spot today. Well, you can, but you would be trespassing on Borussia Dortmund’s training ground.
That first airport was over in Brackel, on the other side of the city. In 1928 it handled more than 8,000 takeoffs and landings, which at the time meant more scheduled traffic than Düsseldorf or Essen. Civil flying stopped in 1939, the war flattened the place, and the RAF took over what was left. When a British rocket unit moved into the barracks in 1959, that was the end of it. The old field now holds a golf course, a housing development, and the pitches where the BVB squad trains (a german football club).
The airport that survived is out in Wickede, at the eastern edge of Dortmund. Its first arrival, on January 1, 1960, was a light aircraft touching down on grass.
Today it moves a little over three million passengers a year, a record set in 2025, on one runway and through one terminal. Wizz Air and Ryanair carry most of them, with Eurowings and SunExpress filling in around the edges. The route map runs to eastern and southern Europe, Turkey, and the usual holiday coasts. This is a budget airport and it has never pretended to be anything else.
That is also the appeal. The terminal opened in 2000, everything sits on one site, and you can get from the curb to your gate in less time than it takes to walk between concourses at Frankfurt (FRA). There is an observation deck upstairs, which is a nice thing to find and getting rarer.
Getting There and Away
By Bus and Train
There is no railway station at the airport. Plan around that first.
Two airport buses do the work. The AirportExpress runs nonstop between Dortmund Hauptbahnhof and the terminal in about twenty-five minutes, roughly once an hour. The AirportShuttle goes the other way to Holzwickede station, six minutes away, every fifteen to twenty minutes. From Holzwickede, local trains reach Dortmund, Unna and Hamm.
Now the part that catches people at the door. Neither of those buses is run by the regional transit authority. A normal VRR ticket does not work on them, and neither does a Deutschlandticket. You buy a separate fare on the bus or from the machine outside the terminal. Rail and Fly tickets are accepted on the shuttle.
Want the cheap way? Take bus 490 to Dortmund-Aplerbeck and change to the U47 tram. That is a regular VRR service and your ordinary ticket covers it. It takes longer and it is not glamorous, which is a fair description of a good deal in the Ruhr, and I mean that with affection. ;-)
One current warning worth acting on. The A40 and the B1 are being widened right next to the airport, and both airport buses are running diversions with real delays. While that lasts, the airport itself recommends taking the RB59 from Dortmund Hauptbahnhof out to Holzwickede and picking up the shuttle there. Check the situation before you set off.
By Car
By car it is straightforward. The A44 has its own Dortmund-Wickede exit, and the A1, A2 and A45 are all within a short run of it, so most of the Ruhr is inside an hour. Parking sits right at the terminal, which for once is not a euphemism for a field with a shuttle bus.
Things to Know
Dortmund closes early, and the exact hours took ten years in court, which I come to further down. Scheduled departures and arrivals stop at 10 p.m., with an allowance for roughly four landings a day up to eleven and late arrivals until half past. Sixteen delayed movements a month, and no more than that.
Check-in and security move quickly by German standards, but the building is sized for about three million people a year and you notice it when two departures line up at once. Ninety minutes is usually plenty. Make it two hours in the school holidays.
The runway is 2,000 m (6,562 ft) long, which rules out anything intercontinental. Every flight from Dortmund is short or medium haul, and if you are going further than that you connect somewhere else.
Check which airport your ticket actually names, too. Weeze (NRN) sells itself as Düsseldorf-Weeze and sits nowhere near Düsseldorf. Münster Osnabrück (FMO) and Paderborn Lippstadt (PAD) are the other regional fields in Westphalia, and both are a proper drive from the Ruhr.
For flight status and departures, use the airport’s own English site. Still deciding where to land? I have a page on airports across Germany, and separate ones on Düsseldorf (DUS) and Cologne Bonn (CGN), the two bigger options in this corner of the country.
The Hour Everyone Fought Over
Those numbers took ten years in court. The airport wanted the hour between ten and eleven, because without it the evening rotation does not work and the aircraft cannot be back for the morning wave. The neighbors, the town of Unna among them, said the noise protection was not good enough.
The district government approved the extension in 2014, the higher administrative court struck it down in 2015, a fresh approval came in 2018 and was ruled unlawful in 2022, and an amended one finally held. In August 2024 the court dismissed the claims of the last three residents, and that December the case ran out of road. Both sides had a case, which is rather why it took a decade.
Before You Go
The Flughafen Dortmund GmbH was founded in 1926, and the airport marked its centenary in April 2026. A hundred years, two locations, and still one runway and a terminal you can cross in five minutes. There is something very Dortmund about that. :-)