Hamburg has been flying from the same patch of ground since January 10, 1911. That makes it the oldest commercial airport in the world, and unlike every other contender for the title, it never moved.
It did not begin with airplanes. The company founded that day was the Hamburger Luftschiffhallen-Gesellschaft, an airship hangar business, put together with 685,000 marks of private money. Zeppelins first, aircraft later. Frankfurt (FRA) built its own airship hangars in 1936, by which point Fuhlsbüttel had already been in the business for a quarter of a century.
Since November 2016 the full name has been Hamburg Airport Helmut Schmidt, after the chancellor who was born in this city in 1918 and ran the country from 1974 to 1982. Nobody says the whole thing out loud. It is on the signs anyway.
Around 14.8 million passengers come through in a year, roughly three quarters of them traveling privately rather than for work. Eurowings runs its operation from here and Condor bases aircraft here too, which tells you what the route map looks like: Europe, a long list of holiday coasts, and a few long-haul services to the Gulf. There has been no direct flight to North America since 2018, so coming from the States you will change somewhere, most likely Frankfurt, Munich or Amsterdam.
The airport sits in Fuhlsbüttel, north of the city and close enough that residential Hamburg starts more or less at the fence. A corner of the site is not even in Hamburg: it reaches across into Norderstedt, which is a different city in a different state.
Getting There and Away
By Train
One line serves the airport, the S1, and the station sits directly beneath the terminals. Twenty-five minutes to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, every ten minutes through the day. From the main station you are on the national network, because no long-distance train comes out to the airport itself.
Now the thing that catches people, and it is the same trick Munich (MUC) plays at Neufahrn. On the way out to the airport, the S1 splits at Ohlsdorf. The front three cars go to the airport. The back three go to Poppenbüttel.
Sit in the front half. The displays on the platform and on the carriage tell you which is which, and if you are not sure, ask somebody, because in Poppenbüttel you will have plenty of time to reflect on it. ;-)
At Hamburg Hauptbahnhof the airport trains leave from platform 3.
The rail link is younger than the airport by ninety-seven years. It opened in 2008, and most of it runs in a tunnel driven up to 30 m (98 ft) below the surface, under the Alster and under the houses of Fuhlsbüttel. That is why it took so long to build a connection to an airport this close to town.
If You Land Late
Scheduled flying stops in the late evening here, and delayed arrivals get a limited window after that. The question that actually matters is whether you can still get away from the airport, and the answer is yes.
The last S1 toward the city runs a little past midnight. After that the night buses take over: on weekdays one goes straight into the center, and at weekends a bus connects to Ohlsdorf station, where the U1 and the S1 keep running right through the night. A late landing in Hamburg does not strand you the way it can at airports built out in the fields. Taxis wait outside arrivals whatever the hour, and the trip is short enough that the fare will not ruin your evening.
By Car
Close enough that traffic matters more than distance. Twenty minutes from the middle of town when the roads behave, considerably longer at the wrong hour on a Friday. The parking decks are right at the terminals.
Which Terminal
Two terminals, joined by a building called the Airport Plaza that holds most of the shops and the food. Terminal 2 opened in 1993 and takes Lufthansa and its Star Alliance partners. Terminal 1 was finished in 2005 and handles everybody else, Oneworld and SkyTeam included. Both sit above the same S-Bahn station. So, arriving by train you simply go up into whichever one you need.
While You Wait
Worth five minutes if you have them: Terminal 2 holds a small permanent exhibition on Helmut and Loki Schmidt. Free, on the public side, and better than another lap of the duty-free.
If you have hours to fill, the airport runs something called the Modellschau, a scale model of the whole airfield where model aircraft take off and land on both runways while somebody explains how the place works and where it came from in the zeppelin days. There is a viewing terrace attached for watching the real thing. It runs about an hour, and it is aimed at children without being only for them.
Things to Know
Two things this airport does better than most, and both save you time. You can book a slot at the security checkpoint in advance and walk into a dedicated lane at that time. And several airlines let you drop your bags the evening before, which turns a brutal early departure into a reasonable morning.
A word on the other airfield. Hamburg has a second one at Finkenwerder, out on the Elbe, where Airbus builds and delivers aircraft. It is a factory field and takes no scheduled traffic, so if a search result or a tour booking points you there, something has gone wrong.
One name to watch on a cheap fare. Lübeck Airport (LBC) has been sold at various times as a Hamburg alternative. It is a different airport in a different city, up toward the Baltic Sea. Getting from Lübeck Airport to Hamburg takes more than one hour.
For flight status and gates, use the airport’s own English site. Still working out where to land? I have a page on airports across Germany, and separate ones on Bremen (BRE) and Lübeck for the rest of the north.
Before You Go
More than a century on the same corner of Fuhlsbüttel, and the whole thing started as a shed for airships. There is something fitting about that in a city that made its fortune moving other people’s cargo long before anyone thought of doing it through the air. If you want that story, my page on the Hanseatic League has it, and it ends with a detail about where Lufthansa got its name that I still enjoy. :-)