Land at BER today and there’s a fair chance you touch down on Schönefeld’s old runway. It was lengthened, renumbered, and folded into the new airport, and it carries traffic every day. The airport it belonged to is the part that died.
Schönefeld stopped being an airport of its own at the end of October 2020. The terminal became Terminal 5 of Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER), lasted a few months, and has been dark ever since. Even the train station gave up. It was renamed after the new airport in 2020 and quietly changed back to Schönefeld (bei Berlin) three years later.
So there’s nothing to see at the old terminal, and the fence makes that plain. What’s left are the stories, and Schönefeld has better ones than most working airports.
East Berlin’s Window on the World
The factory came before the airport. In October 1934 the Henschel Flugzeug-Werke broke ground here. The Kassel engineering company turned the site into one of the larger aircraft plants in Germany. More than 14,000 military aircraft came out of Schönefeld before the war ended.
From 1938 the workforce was mostly foreign and forced labor. From 1943 concentration camp prisoners were made to work here too. The airport company had that history researched and published a few years ago. It took long enough. The administration of today’s BER sits in the old Henschel office building.
Soviet troops took the field in 1945, and a civil airport was ordered in 1947. By the 1960s Schönefeld was the central airport of East Germany and the home base of Interflug, the state airline.
For most East Germans, though, that window did not open. Travel abroad needed permission that ordinary citizens rarely received. The departure board listing Havana, Hanoi, Cairo, and Moscow worked more like a poster than a timetable.
The Cheapest Way Out of Berlin
Here’s where it gets good. West Berlin could only be served by American, British, and French airlines, and those carriers charged what the arrangement let them charge. I wrote about that rule on my page about Tegel (TXL).
Interflug sat outside all of that. No IATA membership, and fuel from the Soviet Union on ruble terms. Fares ran up to 70 percent below the same route out of Tegel.
West Berliners noticed.
From 1963 a bus ran from Charlottenburg through the transit checkpoints straight to the terminal. West Germans bound for Prague or Budapest used it too. Hard currency came walking through the door, and the GDR needed it badly.
Those passengers were handled separately from East German travelers, start to finish. The reason was not comfort. It was making sure nobody slipped into the wrong queue and onto a plane out.
One more thing Interflug left behind: in 1989 it took delivery of three Airbus A310s, its first Western aircraft. Two years later they belonged to the German Air Force, carrying the Chancellor and the President as “Konrad Adenauer” and “Theodor Heuss.” For two decades our government flew around in planes ordered by a country that had ceased to exist. :-)
The Airliner That Landed on a Meadow
On October 23, 1989, an Interflug Ilyushin Il-62 lifted off from Schönefeld. Two weeks later the Wall opened. This was the last flight the aircraft would ever make, and the runway waiting at the far end was 860 m (2,822 ft) of grass.
An Il-62 needs roughly 2,500 m (8,200 ft) of concrete.
Captain Heinz-Dieter Kallbach had the cabin stripped, the ballast drained, and the fuel cut to the minimum. He brought it in barely above the stall, with two engines already shut down in the air to kill the leftover thrust. It worked. The crew went into the Guinness Book for it.
Why a meadow in Brandenburg? Because Otto Lilienthal flew his gliders off the hill above it in the 1890s, and died there in 1896 after a crash. The aircraft was named Lady Agnes, after Lilienthal’s wife, and handed to the village as a gift.
It sits there to this day, at the foot of the Gollenberg near Stölln, and you can walk inside. The forward cabin holds the only permanent Interflug exhibition anywhere. The tail is a registry office, so couples get married in the back of a Soviet airliner parked in a field.
Stölln lies about 100 km (62 mi) west of Berlin, in the Havelland district. The field there is described as the oldest airfield in the world. Plan a half day for it, and check ahead in winter, when the place runs on short hours. Details are on the operator’s site.
From Airport to Terminal 5 to Nothing
When BER opened, the old building was renamed Terminal 5 and kept in reserve for the day the new terminals would overflow. That day never came. Passenger numbers stayed under the forecasts, T5 closed in early 2021, and in November 2022 the supervisory board made it final.
Berlin got a whole terminal ready and then had no use for it. ;-)
Travel sites still list cheap flights out of T5. If your booking says Terminal 5, look again, because you’re flying from Terminal 1 or Terminal 2.
The site itself is headed for a mixed commercial quarter. Architects have had concepts on the table since an ideas competition a few years back. The municipality of Schönefeld around it is booming, which is what happens when a capital airport opens next door.
Still working out where to land in this country? There’s a rundown of the airports in Germany on my hub page.
Before You Go
Next time you land in Berlin, listen for the moment the wheels touch. If you came in on the northern runway, that strip started out as Schönefeld’s. It was laid down when this ground was still East Germany.
The terminal is dark. The runway is doing exactly what it always did.