Frankfurt may have got its new runway, but the second runway at Dusseldorf was a saga of Whitehall Farce proportions.
It was proposed in 1963 and completed in 1992. But it couldn’t be used because the Greens had negotiated in 1983 that its use would be conditional on a movement cap for the whole airport of 71,000 in the busiest six months. By the time the runway opened, the airport was way busier than that.
For a long time the Greens were camped around the airport in case an aircraft – just one – would use the new runway, and the airport management were praying that no aircraft would inadvertently land on it, because that single event would trigger the movement cap and lose the airport a significant proportion of its business. It eventually got sorted but the standoff lasted for a couple of years at least while that very expensive concrete strip just sat there, doing nothing.