Every other big German airport shuts down at night. Frankfurt stops at eleven, Munich at midnight, Düsseldorf as early as ten. Cologne Bonn does not stop at all.
That permission, to run all three runways around the clock, is the single most important fact about this place. It is why UPS chose it as their European hub back in 1986, why FedEx followed, and why something like 840,000 tons of freight move through here in a normal year. It is also why you can find a departure from Cologne at an hour that would be flatly illegal ninety minutes up the autobahn.
On the passenger side this is a low-cost airport and makes no secret of it. Eurowings and Ryanair between them carry more than 60 percent of the traffic, with around thirty other airlines filling in the rest across 108 destinations in 34 countries. Just over ten million people come through in a year. The airport sits in the Wahner Heide, a nature reserve on the southeastern edge of Cologne, in the Porz district. Konrad Adenauer’s name has been attached to it since 1994, and nobody uses it in conversation.
Getting There and Away
By Train
The station opened underneath the terminals in June 2004, built as part of the high-speed line between Cologne and Frankfurt. That made Cologne Bonn the third German airport on the ICE network, after Frankfurt and Düsseldorf.
For the city itself, take the S13 or the S19. Köln Hauptbahnhof is about fourteen minutes away, and from there the whole rail network opens up. The RE 6 and RE 8 stop here too and are faster to some destinations.
Two warnings about the long-distance trains, and both of them cost people money. Not every ICE stops at the airport, so check your specific connection instead of assuming. And a long-distance ticket to Köln Hauptbahnhof does not include the leg out to the airport. Book through to Köln/Bonn Flughafen, not just to the main station.
Now the awkward half of the name. Getting to Bonn from here is nothing like getting to Cologne. The S13 runs the other way, toward Troisdorf, and the extension down to Bonn-Oberkassel is still under construction.
For Bonn the sensible option is the SB 60 bus, roughly half an hour from the terminal to the main station. By train it means a change and more time. The name on the sign promises a symmetry that the timetable does not deliver. ;-)
By Car
The airport is wrapped by the A3 and the A59, and the approach road carries you almost to the terminal door. That is the original design from the 1960s still doing its job, and I come back to the man behind it further down. Fifteen to twenty minutes into Cologne outside rush hour.
Which Terminal
Two terminals, and here is the thing that catches transfer passengers out. Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 are not connected airside. If your itinerary moves you from one to the other, you leave the secure area, walk across on the public side, and clear security again at the far end. Give it a good twenty minutes, more at busy hours.
Terminal 1 handles Eurowings, Lufthansa and Austrian. Terminal 2, the glass-and-steel building just to the north, opened in 2000 and takes Ryanair along with most of the other budget carriers. Both sit directly over the railway station, so if you arrive by train you walk up into whichever one you need.
Things to Know
The round-the-clock rule cuts both ways. You can leave at four in the morning or land at one, which is a large part of why the fares here look the way they do. Just work out how you are getting into town at that hour before you book. The airport running all night does not mean anything else does.
Check the airport name on a cheap fare, too. A ticket that says Düsseldorf-Weeze is not this airport and not Düsseldorf either; Weeze (NRN) sits well off to the northwest near the Dutch border. Dortmund (DTM) is the other budget field in this corner of the country, and it is a proper drive from Cologne as well.
The terminals are compact and easy to read, but the security lanes in Terminal 1 back up at peak hours, which is the one place where a design from 1970 shows its age. Two hours for a European departure, three for anything long-haul.
For flight status and gates, use the airport’s own English site. Still working out where to come into the country? I have a page on airports across Germany, and separate ones on Frankfurt (FRA) and Munich (MUC).
Europe’s First Drive-in Airport
Terminal 1 deserves two minutes of your attention before you walk through it, because it is not an ordinary airport building.
Paul Schneider-Esleben designed it between 1963 and 1970, and the thinking behind it was radical for the time: get people out of their cars and onto their aircraft with as little walking as possible. He built a 500 m (1,640 ft) terraced reception hall in exposed concrete, and instead of one enormous departure hall he hung two star-shaped piers off it, each with check-in right beside the aircraft stands. The access roads run straight up to the building.
From outside it looks like a concrete mountain. Inside, the tapered beams and paired columns make the whole thing feel oddly light. Airports around the world went on to copy the layout.
It is not a protected monument, which surprises people who know the building. Decades of fitting things in and ripping things out have blurred the original too far for that. And when Helmut Jahn was brought in from 1997 onward to build Terminal 2 and the vaulted station hall, Schneider-Esleben took the airport company to court over the copyright in his own design. The extensions went up anyway. The stars are still there, and you can still see what he was after.
The Airport of the Bonn Republic
Cologne Bonn looks the way it does because of a decision taken in 1958. West Germany needed a second international jet airport alongside Frankfurt, and the choice landed here, because Bonn was the capital and the government needed somewhere to fly from. The 3,815 m (12,516 ft) runway was finished by 1961 and Schneider-Esleben’s terminal followed. Adenauer’s name went on the airport in 1994. He had been mayor of Cologne long before he was chancellor, and he had pushed hard for a civilian airport out at Wahn.
The government part never left. On your way in, look at the freight halls lined up along the runway. Behind them sits the military side of the field: three hangars, a separate terminal building, its own fire station. That is where the Luftwaffe keeps the aircraft that fly German ministers and members of parliament around the world. They are not visible from your gate, and that is rather the point.
Before You Go
One last thing, filed under improbable events. In 1983 the Space Shuttle Enterprise came to Cologne Bonn on a European tour, riding piggyback on a Boeing 747. The airport was on NASA’s list of emergency landing sites for the shuttle, one of around sixty worldwide. No shuttle ever needed it, and the program ended in 2011.
The space connection outlasted the shuttle, though. The German aerospace center has a 55-hectare (136-acre) campus right next door, and the European Space Agency’s astronaut center sits on it. European astronauts have done their training there for decades, a short walk from wherever you happen to be standing in the security line. :-)