Most airports are built for people, and freight takes whatever room is left over. Leipzig/Halle got it the other way around. More air cargo moves through this field than through any German airport except Frankfurt (FRA). Nowhere else in the European Union handles more freight-only flights. DHL runs its European express network from here. And since 2022, when Antonov Airlines lost its home field outside Kyiv, the largest cargo aircraft still flying are parked here too.
Two runways of 3,600 m (11,800 ft) each, for a little over two million passengers a year. That is a lot of concrete for that many people.
Here is the part that can cost you. Freight flies around the clock. Passenger aircraft do not: they are barred for a long stretch either side of midnight, so nobody lands here at three in the morning. The trouble is the other end of that window. The earliest departures go out before the first train of the day can get you here. Sort that out before you book the cheap early flight, which I come back to further down.
The airport sits entirely on the territory of Schkeuditz, halfway between Leipzig and Halle (Saale). The A9 and the A14 meet right next to it at the Schkeuditzer Kreuz. Signs point to a Zentralterminal (central terminal) and to Terminal B, but that is no decision you have to make. Check-in and the railway station are in the first, security and the gates in the second. A short walkway joins them.
Getting There and Away
By Train
The station sits directly beneath the check-in hall. Escalator or lift, and you are at the counters. It is the best thing about this airport.
The S5 and S5X commuter trains run twice an hour for most of the day. The ride takes about a quarter of an hour from Leipzig Hauptbahnhof (main station) and rather less from Halle (Saale) Hauptbahnhof. Intercity trains stop here as well, which is unusual for an airport this size. Coming from further afield, take an ICE into either city and change once. That beats hunting for a direct train. There is more on my page about German rail.
By Bus
Buses are the thin spot here, and I would rather say so than pad the section. One local line links Schkeuditz with the airport on weekdays. That is the whole municipal network. Long-distance coaches do call here, and an airport shuttle covers a radius of some 45 km (28 mi) around the clock. For the airport itself, take the train.
By Car or Taxi
Off the A14, take the exit signposted Flughafen Leipzig/Halle. From the A9 it is the Großkugel exit. The parking decks stand right at the Zentralterminal. They are close enough that paying extra for the nearest one buys you almost nothing. Taxis wait outside arrivals, about half an hour into Leipzig and a little more into Halle.
Rental cars are straightforward here, which is not true of every German airport. The desks sit in Terminal B on the lower level, several of the big companies among them. No shuttle bus is involved. Returns go to the marked area under the parking deck. Book ahead for summer, because the charter peak empties the fleet. And settle the after-hours key box when you book, not at midnight with a flight to catch.
If You Land Late
The commuter trains stop running in the small hours. After that a night bus takes over, a couple of times in each direction, and it serves Leipzig only. Nothing at all runs to Halle in the middle of the night. Budget for a taxi if that is where you are headed.
Those few night departures matter for early flights too. The first train of the morning is fine for a mid-morning takeoff and useless for a dawn one. If your flight leaves before the city wakes up, it is the night bus, a taxi, or a room at one of the Leipzig hotels out this way. Check the current timetables before you commit to any of it, because both the trains and the night bus have changed hours more than once.
While You Wait
The roof of the administration building, once the tower, carries a public viewing terrace about 30 m (100 ft) up. It opens in decent weather for a small charge. At most airports that would be a pleasant half hour. Here it is better. What rolls past is not a row of identical narrow-bodies waiting for Mallorca: freighters work the field all day, and the Antonov aircraft are usually on the ground somewhere. That is why plane spotters drive out on purpose. The photographers use the visitors’ hill across the north runway. Two hours to kill and a kid who likes airplanes? Go up. :-)
With a spare afternoon rather than a spare hour, both of Leipzig’s car plants take visitors. Neither is at the airport, whatever the older guidebooks say. Porsche builds the Panamera and the Macan on the northern edge of the city, some twenty minutes out. BMW sits a few minutes beyond that. Book ahead for either one. My page on German cars has the wider story, and there is more in town on my list of Leipzig attractions.
Things to Know
Ninety minutes ahead of a European departure is plenty. The terminal is small, security rarely backs up, and the walk from platform to gate is short. Make it two hours for anything outside the Schengen area.
Do not confuse this place with Leipzig-Altenburg Airport (AOC). That one is an hour to the southeast and has no scheduled service at all. If a booking says Leipzig, check the three-letter code before you drive anywhere.
The passenger side is mostly holiday flying, plus Lufthansa feeders into Frankfurt and Munich (MUC) for onward connections. If that does not cover your route, Berlin Brandenburg (BER) is a little over an hour away by train. Dresden Airport (DRS) is under two by road. My overview of airports in Germany lays out the map. For schedules, flight status, and current opening times, go to the Leipzig/Halle Airport website directly.
The Autobahn Rest Stop with a Runway
For decades this place carried a nickname among German aviation people: Autobahnraststätte mit Landebahn, the autobahn rest stop with a runway. It was not entirely a joke.
The airport opened in April 1927 on open land between two rival cities, because neither would let the other keep it. Then came the war, the bombs, and forty years of a different Germany. In East Germany the field went quiet. It woke twice a year for the Leipziger Messe, the trade fair that was the country’s window on the West. So the terminal built in 1968 had a double life. Four weeks a year it handled fair passengers. The other forty-eight it worked as an autobahn service area. Yep. That is where the nickname comes from.
The fair also produced the strangest thing this airport has seen. On a March morning in 1986, an Air France Concorde came down the approach and landed in the German Democratic Republic. Tens of thousands stood at the fences to watch a machine they knew from pictures and were never going to board. A British Airways Concorde followed within days and never came back. The Air France aircraft kept returning every spring and autumn until 1990. It reached the city the long way round, over the North Sea and the Baltic, because going supersonic across the inner German border was out of the question.
After reunification the money arrived: a north runway in 2000, the central terminal in 2003, a south runway in 2007. Then DHL moved its European hub here from Brussels. A court ruling had made that possible by confirming that express freight may fly at night, without the curfew that grounds cargo almost everywhere else in Germany.
It came at a price with an address. The village of Kursdorf ended up enclosed by the two runways, the autobahn, and the high-speed railway, with one way out beneath a bridge that aircraft taxi across. The last residents left in 2017, and the church and old school still stand there, empty.
Watch for those taxiway bridges on the drive in. Two of them, each roughly 190 m (620 ft) long and 63 m (207 ft) wide, carry aircraft over the A14. Time it right and a freighter crosses the motorway above your roof. :-)
Where the Avengers Fell Out
If the terminal looks oddly familiar and you have never set foot in Saxony, you have probably seen it in Captain America: Civil War. The airport fight is set here and named on screen. That is the one where the two halves of the team take each other apart across the apron.
Now the part the location guides get wrong. The production did shoot here in the summer of 2015. You can see it in the terminal walkways, and under the taxiway bridge where Sharon Carter hands the shield out of a car trunk. But the brawl itself was filmed mostly in Georgia. Nobody was going to close a working cargo hub for a month of stunt work. ;-)
Before You Go
The last thing most passengers see here is a departure board with a dozen holiday destinations on it. As a summary of the passenger business, that board is honest enough. It just leaves out the part that pays for the place.
Stay until dark and it becomes a different airport. The terminal empties late in the evening, and then the other shift starts. DHL aircraft arrive from across Europe in a wave. The containers move. Before dawn they have all gone again, a few miles from a city that sleeps through the whole thing.
A field that spent forty years moonlighting as a rest stop now shifts more freight than anywhere in Germany but Frankfurt. Not a bad second act. ;-)