When NASA sends astronauts toward the moon in an Orion capsule, the section behind them that supplies power, air, water, and thrust was built beside a runway in Bremen.
Airbus Defence and Space assembles the European Service Module here, at the edge of the airport, in the same complex that produced the Columbus laboratory for the International Space Station—and the supply ships that used to fly up to it. Next door, another part of Airbus builds wings and cabin sections, and the airport doubles as the works airfield that flies them out.
For a place handling two million passengers a year, a remarkable amount of what leaves here is not going on holiday.
The full name, since 2017, is Bremen Airport Hans Koschnick, after the man who ran the city for twelve years. Nobody uses all of it.
Just under two million passengers came through in 2025, with Ryanair the largest operator and a base of its own here, and Eurowings, Lufthansa, SundAir, Turkish Airlines, and Aegean filling out the board. Direct flights go to Europe and north Africa, mostly to places with a beach at the end. Everything else is one change away at Frankfurt, Munich, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Zurich or Vienna.
The airfield goes back to 1909, when the Bremer Verein für Luftfahrt was founded to build an airship harbor for the city. That club still exists and still sits on the airport grounds.
Bremen was also the first airport in Germany to lay a paved runway, which in the mud of the north German plain was less of a luxury than it sounds. A corner of that runway reaches across into the neighboring municipality of Stuhr.
Getting There and Away
This is where Bremen differs from every other airport in the country. Walk out of the terminal and there is a tram stop. Not a bus to a train, not a shuttle to a station somewhere else on the field. A tram, line 6, about twenty steps from the check-in counters. ;-)
Eleven minutes to Domsheide in the old city. It also runs to the Hauptbahnhof and out to the trade fair grounds. Buy your ticket from the machine at the stop before you board.
That is more or less the whole transport section. No long-distance trains stop at the airport, and you do not need them, because the main station is a few minutes away on that same tram; plus, the rest of northern Germany connects from there.
By car it is a short run off the A281, with parking at the terminal. A taxi makes sense here in a way it does not at most airports, for the simple reason that the trip is so short.
The Airplane on the Roof
Go up to the visitors’ terrace on the roof of Terminal 3. There is an aircraft parked up there that crossed the Atlantic the hard way.
On April 12, 1928, a Junkers W33 named Bremen lifted off from Baldonnel near Dublin heading west, into the prevailing wind, the direction nobody had managed before. Hermann Köhl was at the controls, with the Bremen nobleman Ehrenfried Günther Freiherr von Hünefeld and the Irish officer James Fitzmaurice aboard. Thirty-seven hours later they came down on Greenly Island, a rock off the Quebec shore and a long way north of the New York they had been aiming for. They were out of options and put down at the first settlement they could see.
The machine that did it, D-1167, stands in the Bremenhalle on that roof. The original, not a replica. Admission costs a couple of euros, the terrace beside it looks straight out over the runway, and the visit takes about as long as a coffee. For an airport this size, that is a serious thing to have on the premises.
Things to Know
The place is small enough that the usual advice does not apply. Ninety minutes ahead of a European departure is plenty, and on a quiet morning you will be through security in ten.
There is a night flight restriction, so the last departures go in the evening and nothing scheduled leaves in the small hours. That matters less here than it would elsewhere: with the tram running, you are standing in the old city faster than you would get out of the parking garage at a bigger airport.
If Bremen does not have your route, Hamburg (HAM) and Hanover (HAJ) are both within easy reach by train. Bremerhaven has an airfield on some maps, but it lost its scheduled traffic years ago, hence it’s not an option.
For flight status and gates, use the airport’s own English site. Still working out where to come into the north? I have a page on airports across Germany, and one on Bremen itself if the city is where you are headed.
Before You Go
A town that got rich carrying other people’s cargo across the Atlantic now builds the part of a spacecraft that carries people to the moon. And the airplane that first crossed that ocean westward sits on a terminal roof eleven minutes from the old market square. If you want the first half of that story, my page on the Hanseatic League has it. Bremen has been in the business of going places for a very long time. :-)