Düsseldorf Airport is twelve minutes from the middle of town by train, and that one fact explains most of what follows.
The field opened in Lohausen in 1927, back when Lohausen was a village north of the city. Düsseldorf grew out to meet it, then grew past it, and the rest of the Rhine-Ruhr kept filling in around it.
What you have today is the airport of the most crowded metropolitan region in Germany, with something like 18 million people inside its catchment area—houses under the approach, and neighbors who have been to court about it. The closeness is why the ride into the city is so short. It is also why this airport has been legally tied down since 1965.
Around 21 million passengers a year come through, carried by roughly seventy-five airlines. Eurowings runs its main operation from here, and Condor, Corendon, SunExpress and TUI fly all base aircraft here as well, which tells you what most of the traffic actually is: people from the Rhine-Ruhr heading somewhere warmer, and business travelers arriving for the trade fairs.
Getting There and Away
By Train
This is where people lose a quarter of an hour and some dignity. The airport has two railway stations and their names are almost the same.
Düsseldorf Flughafen Terminal sits directly beneath Terminal C. One line stops there, the S11, and it reaches Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof in about twelve minutes. If central Düsseldorf is where you are going, take the escalator down and get on it.
Düsseldorf Flughafen, without the word Terminal, is the long-distance station at the eastern edge of the airfield. More than 300 trains call there daily, ICE and IC among them. Cologne is fifteen to twenty minutes away, Frankfurt Airport around an hour. If your destination is another German city, that is your station.
The two are nowhere near each other. Walking between them takes twenty to thirty minutes, which is the whole reason the SkyTrain exists: a free elevated shuttle running every five to seven minutes between the long-distance station, the parking decks, and both ends of the terminal building.
It carries you around the airport. It does not carry you to Düsseldorf, whatever the name suggests, and a fair number of arriving passengers work that out the hard way every year. ;-)
One more option that hardly anyone outside the region knows about: the U80 light rail runs from the Hauptbahnhof straight to Terminal C, no change of trains at all.
By Car and Taxi
The airport hangs off the A44 autobahn just north of the city. A car into the center runs fifteen to twenty minutes outside rush hour, and the distance is short enough that a taxi is a defensible choice if you are carrying real luggage. That is not something I would say about Munich (MUC).
Heading somewhere else in the Ruhr instead? Check the long-distance station before you book a car. Essen, Duisburg and Cologne all have direct trains from the airport.
Which Terminal
Three terminals, one building. A, B, and C sit end to end along a single connected spine, and walking the whole length takes about fifteen minutes. No shuttle buses between concourses, no satellite out on the apron, no underground people mover. After Frankfurt (FRA) this feels almost restful.
Terminal A belongs to Lufthansa, Eurowings and their Star Alliance partners. Terminal B handles the SkyTeam and Oneworld carriers along with most of the holiday airlines. Terminal C takes the rest, and the S-Bahn station sits directly underneath it.
Check the letter before you check anything else, because each terminal has its own security lanes. Getting it wrong here is not the catastrophe it would be in Frankfurt, but it is fifteen minutes you did not budget for.
Things to Know
The night rule here is the tightest of Germany’s big airports, and it comes out of a court settlement from 1965 that I get to further down. Scheduled departures stop at 10 p.m. and do not start again until 6 a.m. Frankfurt closes at eleven, Munich at midnight. If you are booking the last flight of the evening out of Düsseldorf, there is less slack in front of you than you might assume.
The SkyTrain is this airport’s single point of failure and everybody here knows it. When it goes down, replacement buses run and the whole operation gets noticeably less smooth. Build in a buffer if you are arriving by long-distance train for a tight departure.
Watch the airport name on a cheap fare, too. Some carriers sell flights to Weeze (NRN) as Düsseldorf-Weeze. That is roughly an hour and a quarter away by bus and train, and it is a different place entirely.
And if your trip falls during a major trade fair, book the hotel before you book the flight. Düsseldorf hosts some of the largest fairs in the world, and in those weeks the city runs out of rooms while the airport runs at capacity.
For flight status, gates, and the current state of the SkyTrain, 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 and Munich.
The Fire of April 1996
On April 11, 1996, two workmen were welding an expansion joint on the elevated roadway above the arrivals hall. Hot bitumen dripped through onto a suspended ceiling packed with polystyrene insulation. The smoldering fire went unnoticed for roughly two and a half hours. When it finally broke through, the smoke moved faster than anyone could respond to it.
Seventeen people died, most of them from the fumes rather than the flames. Nine were trapped in a lounge with no second exit. Seven were in elevators that opened straight into the fire. Around a thousand firefighters worked the building that afternoon and evening.
It is still the deadliest structural fire at any airport terminal anywhere, and it rewrote fire protection rules for public buildings across Germany.
Terminal A reopened in 1998, Terminal B in 2001. Nothing you walk through today is the building that burned.
There is a memorial room at the airport carrying the names of the seventeen.
The Agreement That Still Runs the Airport
In the 1960s the airport wanted a second runway. The towns to the north (grouped then under an administrative district called Angerland and today mostly part of Ratingen) took it to the administrative court in Münster. In May 1965 all four parties signed a settlement instead of fighting it out: the towns, the city of Düsseldorf, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the airport company. It capped how far the airport could ever be built out, banned scheduled departures between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., and permitted the second runway only as a fallback, usable when the main one is out of service or during peak hours, never as a free second lane.
The airport tried to walk away from the deal in 1998. In 2002 the court ruled that it could not, calling the settlement binding and not terminable. So a document from 1965, written before wide-body jets ever came near this place, still decides how many aircraft can land here on a Tuesday afternoon. An application to adjust the terms went to the state ministry in December 2025. If you want a sense of how that will go, look at how the last attempt went.
Before You Go
Düsseldorf turns a hundred in April 2027. It has spent most of that century being too close to everything: to the city that grew around it, to the towns that took it to court, to the millions of people living within a short drive of its fence. That closeness is a permanent headache for the airport and a straightforward gift to anyone flying in. Twelve minutes from the platform under Terminal C and you are standing in the middle of town. :-)