If you ever flew into Moscow through Sheremetyevo and thought the terminal looked oddly German, there was a reason. Terminal F, opened for the 1980 Olympics (and still standing), is a scaled-up version of the terminals here in Hanover. Same architects. It was put up by Rüterbau, a Hanover company, and nearly everything that went into it was shipped east from Germany. Everything except the bricks, which came from Poland.
People sometimes call this a gateway to eastern Europe. The flight schedule never really justified that. The architecture did.
What Hanover actually is, is a holiday airport. Around 5.3 million passengers a year, most of them headed for a beach. TUI has its German headquarters in the city and TUIfly is based here at the field, with Eurowings and Corendon keeping aircraft here as well. Intercontinental service to the United States and Canada was tried in the 1990s and dropped for lack of demand, so the map runs to Europe, Turkey, and north Africa—and that is that.
One thing does set it apart from most German airports. It never closes. There is no general night flying ban at Hanover, which makes it the only airport in the north of the country open around the clock. Freight likes that: Amazon runs a Prime Air operation here and FedEx uses it as a hub, and it is the only international air cargo hub in Lower Saxony.
Getting There and Away
By Train
One line does the work. The S5 runs from the station beneath Terminal C to Hannover Hauptbahnhof in seventeen minutes. From the main station you are on the ICE network in every direction, because no long-distance train comes out to the airport itself.
That connection is worth more than it looks. Hannover Hauptbahnhof is one of the busiest junctions on the German network, with fast trains running north to Hamburg, east to Berlin and west toward the Ruhr. Landing here and taking the train onward is a reasonable plan even when Hanover is not your destination, and on a cheap fare it sometimes beats flying into the city you actually want.
During the big trade fairs the S-Bahn adds extra services, and you will be glad of them, because during the big trade fairs everything else in this city is full.
By Car
By car it is a short run up the A352 from the A2, and the parking decks sit at the terminals. The airport is in Langenhagen, a town in its own right rather than a stretch of Hanover suburb. Taxis wait outside arrivals whatever the hour, which counts for more here than at most German airports, because aircraft really do land at three in the morning.
Which Terminal
Three terminals. A and B date from 1973 and are the pair that ended up in Moscow. C came along in 1998 and is the largest.
The split is unusual, and nobody explains it until you are standing in the wrong hall. It runs neither by airline nor by alliance but by destination: flights within the EU are handled at Terminal A or B, flights outside the EU at Terminal C. The same carrier can therefore send you to two different buildings depending on where you are going, and your Mallorca departure and your Antalya departure do not leave from the same place. Yeah, true.
The S-Bahn station sits under Terminal C. Everything is a few minutes’ walk from everything else, so getting it wrong costs you time rather than a flight.
While You Wait
Terminal B has held an exhibition since 2025 called Rockstage, on the history of the Scorpions. The band came together in Hanover in the 1960s and never really left, and if “Wind of Change” or “Rock You Like a Hurricane” means anything to you, that is a better use of forty minutes than another lap of the duty-free. I have a separate page on German music if you want the wider story.
The other one is the Welt der Luftfahrt, the aviation exhibition, with the Jatho replica in it. You can book time in an A320 or 737 simulator there and find out how hard the job actually is.
Things to Know
For flight status and gates, use the airport’s own English pages. Still deciding where to come into the north? I have separate pages on Hamburg (HAM) and Bremen (BRE), and one on airports across Germany.
Hanover’s Claim on the First Flight
Long before there was an airport out here, there was a city clerk on a heath north of town with a machine he had built himself.
Karl Jatho took his contraption out to the Vahrenwalder Heide on August 18, 1903, and by his own account got it about 20 m (66 ft) through the air at roughly knee height. In November, he said, he managed 60 m (200 ft). The Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk on December 17 of the same year, four months later.
I am not going to tell you Jatho beat them, because the evidence will not carry it. No independent account of that August afternoon exists. The notarized statements from four witnesses were collected thirty years after the fact, in 1933, when Jatho was an old man with a reputation to secure. And whatever lifted his machine off the heath, it was not a firm grasp of how a wing works. Aerodynamically he had fallen behind what Otto Lilienthal worked out a decade earlier.
The rest of it is not in dispute. Jatho’s machine was the first aircraft anywhere with a seat for the pilot, a lap belt to hold him in it, and an undercarriage to roll on. Every airplane you have ever boarded has all three.
A replica stands in the airport’s permanent exhibition, his memorial stone sits outside the administration building, and the general aviation terminal carries his name. Hanover has made up its mind about the question. I would not go there and argue. ;-)
Before You Go
From 1957 to 1990 this airport hosted the ILA, the largest air show in Germany, before it moved to Berlin. If the place strikes you as a size too big for five million passengers, that is part of the reason.
A terminal design from 1973 that ended up in Moscow. A city clerk who may or may not have flown before the Wrights. An air show that outgrew the place, and a rock band exhibition in the departures hall. For an airport this size, Hanover has a good deal going on that has nothing to do with flying. :-)