Berlin Brandenburg
 

It's with great relief and some sadness that I can report that Flughafen Berlin-Brandenburg "Willy Brandt" (BER) opened for business today. The first two flights (Easyjet U23110 from TXL and Lufthansa LH2020 from MUC) just landed half an hour ago. After eight years of delays and quite some scandal, this hot mess of an airport project finally goes operational. The deep irony is that BER opens with this pandemic hitting aviation and everybody else hard, so there will be not much business at BER in the foreseeable future. And as you might guess from my handle on this humble forum, I am also a bit sad because this means that my favorite neighborhood airport of the last 30 years will be closed for good. Goodbye, TXL.

AFAIK Tegel will be kept on standby for another six months. Could any non-scheduled flight still land at Tegel during this time?

Yes, TXL will be kept operational for another six months. Don't know about actual flights, though. Last day of regular ops will be Nov 7. On Nov 8, a final Air France flight will depart to Paris CDG. First scheduled flight to land at TXL in 1960 also was an AF. German Air Force will continue chopper service for our beloved government from TXL for a couple of years. The airport buildings and grounds will be converted to a university campus, business sites and living areas.

Are there any plans for the B707 that has been sitting in the grass at TXL for many years? It has a very interesting history. https://digitalcosmonaut.com/2016/be...ed-boeing-707/

I heard it will be chopped. No museum is interested and its hard to move anywhere else.

Like the flight numbers and the fact the first to land was a UK reg aircraft

Wasn't Tegel "the new airport" back in the late 1960's? I have vague memory of it being able to handle some traffic that Tempelhof could not (747s? maybe), but I was school aged back then so details are foggy-to-gone at this point

The B707 has been rotting away there for years, interiors have been stolen. Lufthansa gifted the airframe to Technikmuseum Berlin, but they neither have the space nor financial means to restore it. So it's going to be demolished in the coming months, on Lufthansa's dime.

Good old TXL felt a bit like a trip into the 1980s from outside. That brutalist terminal building just belongs to a different epoch. Hopefully they will find a way to revive "Die S-Bahn" though, the Currywurst in that little red train carriage was really good.

I landed on the new Runway many moons ago, together with a whole lot other aircraft.
So not a british reg has been the first aircraft to land, it was a pegasus 737
That happened in 02.05.2015 during a trial for the new runway and renovation of the other runway.
First takeoff was a condor A320 at 0535 local and first landing was the pegasus 737 at 0555 local

The first touch and go was a german flightinstructor with a small cessna, he touched during the construction of the new runway nearly 8 years ago.
That was ilegal and he was fined about the landing.

Tegel was in the French Sector of Berlin, so of course AF was the first and now appropriately the last. Tempelhof was in the American Sector, and Gatow in the British Sector. In the Soviet Sector was Adlershof. Contrary to much belief, Schonefeld was not in the Soviet Sector, or in East Berlin, but (just) outside, in the mainstream DDR, which led to all sorts of additional bureaucratic issues to get there from West Berlin.

Take a look at this picture,
https://img.kaloo.ga/thumb?url=http%...size=1848x1040

Easyjet Europe,
OE-IZQ
cant see any UK reg on that plane.

Air traffic at Tegel when the wall was still up was all done by french controllers with american (USAF) doing the enroute .

That's another plane at Tegel. The one that landed first today was G-UZHF, see these pics for reference.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....c8c8e6c056.jpg

inbalance

Well, I landed on it in 2014 (possibly 2013??) regularly, using ATR.
We were flying freight.
I believe it was for political / business reasons, so it could then be said that BER had opened.

Um, how did that condor A320 get there? Must have landed before it took off, surely? Therefore, before the pegasus 737?

The condor landed on the north runway and that belonged, until today, to berlin Schönefeld airport.

txl

Where did you get this information from if I may ask? When I spoke to the Press Lady in charge at Tegel 3ish months ago, there was substantial interest/plans that the Transport Museum was going to take over the Boeing. As for the interiors, despite having ventilation shafts installed - everything inside is covered in mold and unsalvageable - though I hadnt heard or seen images re:the interiors being stolen.

iamkosmonaut, didn't say that they cleaned out the whole thing, but some stuff has gone missing over the years.

The info pertaining to the plane being scrapped is from a recent article (a week ago) in Berliner Morgenpost quoted by Aero Telegraph:

Also confirmed by local tv news a couple of days ago. They tried to do salvage the thing, but apparently couldn't make it work.

It's not a Lufthansa airframe. During the wall it flew in, N-registered, as a political reminder that Lufthansa had some interest in going to Berlin. It had been some strange Boeing "gift" to Lufthansa. The livery used to be Lufthansa but not true to the original.