Leipzig or Hannover might be the alternates of choice in the future whenever EDDB is unable to accept landings. Mind you they now have only one single working runway.

Leipzig is not open to passenger traffic at night. And therefore cannot be legally planned as alternate close to the night curfew.

It is a bit off topic, but it would have been the best solution to built a new airport in the centre of the Berlin-Dresden-Leipzig triangle, serving all three cities and connect them to the airport with high speed trains. This would have been possible in the early 90´s, but patchwork came out in the end. Like a mini bus shuttle from Dresden to Leipzig to connect with the daily British Airways London-Heathrow Service.

That's due to the federal states and their different interests and rivalries. Something like Jüterbog halfway between Berlin and very populated Leipzig/Halle area next to the railway line would have been perfect and almost ready to use. There are, even today, huge deserted former soviet military tank firing ranges available for redevelopment. But this would have been the next Frankfurt airport and national hub that none of the old players wanted.
Combined with local narrow minded state politicians they ended up with the - too close to the city - BER site.

Well, that discussion is about 30 years too late by now.

Correct but this 30 year old misjudgment will only now become everybody's daily pain.

Have many (fond) memories of TXL - definitely one of the very last "different" airports remaining in Europe. Just as THF I will definitely mourn its passing, but such is life, nothing lasts forever. Just sad that they could not organize a proper "farewell" party...

As others have pointed out the move is certainly rational but also risky - they are putting themselves against the wall... but if anywhere I guess that's the place where they know how to handle such situations :O.

Interesting points about the lack of diversion. Leipzig would be the obvious choice and could be arranged quite nicely with proper collaboration... so won't happen. Wonder what is the "official" plan at the moment ?

The closure of Tegel is as sensible as the closure of Tempelhof was, moving the airport further from the city again and sacrifying accessibility in search of a grandeur and "global reach" airport that BER will not become. I had the luck to fly to THF a couple of times and leaving the terminal landside onto a city square was quite unique (as the terminal architecture which luckily we'll continue to be able to enjoy as it's a listed building).

Tempelhof is now finally to become some aviation museum: Museum für Verkehr und Technik and Alliiertenmuseum are seriously planning to display aviation stuff there. After major remodeling of the main hangar bay. And possibly Bundeswehr from Luftwaffenmuseum at Gatow will move in one day too? Not sure about the latter. It would be some fantastic place for their Cold War collection from both east and west.

Tegel is said to become partly some housing area and the terminal is planned to be converted to become some technical higher school or similar. However Bundeswehr's own VIP-helicopter squadron at Tegel Air Base will remain there at least until 2029. Only VIP-aircraft will move to Schönefeld's new built government terminal. In the very north not close to the BER site.

If by not close you mean on the other side of the runway..

West of the Schönfeld site not at the BER site itself.

Wonder if they will have a look to the flooded basement...

Planning for a new aviation museum at this time is probably a joke. Our friends in the East of the nation, who have burned billions of Euro already, should first of all make sure their " BER " is running properly and become a modest international airport. BER will never become a intercontinental airport, no matter what people dream of, for as long as I can remember, all attempts to operate intercontinental services from Berlin have failed. As a former Lufthansa sales manager, based in Berlin, once said, the whole East is a cheap ticket market. It is rather suited to carriers like Easyjet, which already is sort of a flag carrier in the region.

Not anymore. There are a lot of small companies in Berlin that have passed the startup phase and are now profitable, growing and generate business travel especially to the US. IT companies especially. Even Siemens is moving back to Siemensstadt their prewar HQ now.
I don't see Berlin becoming a global hub but there will be business routes viable especially to Asia. They are closer to Asia compared to western Europe. Berlin still needs to catch up with tens of years of lost development when it was divided and isolated. But it does recover surprisingly fast. Finally not by state aid programs only but more and more by private investments. There are MANY new asian company people in Berlin now, it is dynamic so to say. Give it another twenty years and it's a global business place again.

Î hope you are right, Less Hair, your judgment regarding 20 years sounds realistic. What is forgotten very often is the fact that to make a long haul route profitable you have to fill 200 seats or more every day, depending on the size of aircraft, 365 days every year. You can only achieve this with a feeder service, which, in this case, would mean to divert feeder traffic from Frankfurt and from Munich. I doubt they would surrender a single passenger to BER.

As posted above intercontinental flights work best with a hub. Lufthansa group already has two in Germany, and three more nearby if you count Brussels, Vienna and Zurich. Flights to other airline's hubs for example in the Middle East and USA will almost certainly be a feature of Berlin. But Lufthansa ditching Munich to hub and spoke in Berlin looks highly improbable, particularly as Munich is much closer to Italy which has been a major feeder of transfer passengers. The upside with SXF over TXL should be the integration of better onward travel links particularly long distance rail. TXL was pretty limited with only bus transport into the city or to the nearest underground station, which was a few kilometres away.

LH will not do it. That's no surprise. They prefer to route Berlin passengers through their own existing hubs.

However this leaves some of the few developing markets in Germany to other competitors. At least the airport to do it will finally be there now. It will not be a formal legacy airline fortress hub it will be p-t-p flights by different players. But with spoke routes connecting throughout Europe. And this is what makes LH nervous. Remember when EK wanted traffic rights to fly to Berlin?

Indeed. Berlin already had direct connections to Beijing and Singapore before Corona, as well as a few US flights. I do agree that there won't be a hub in Berlin, there is neither an airline willing to make the case nor really the terminal for that, the new BER is already too small if measured at 2018 traffic levels, even with the hastily developed Terminal 4 and the decision to keep the old SXF terminals open for ryanair and wizzair (complete lunacy, but then, it is berlin...). And yes, of course part of that is the tourist and party crowd, but an increasing amount of passengers is there for business reasons, after all berlin has a very vibrant startup and IT scene right now, it is not really a surprise that Tesla opens its european design and development center in the city, not to mention the new factory right outside of it (and very close to BER).

But of course, the city still has a lot of catching up to do, after all it was basically closed down for business for around 40 years.

You seem to have a pretty short memory then. Connections to MIA, JFK and ORD have been quite sucessful under Air Berlin. The latter two had a sizeable amount of polish passengers aboard.
Then again, I'd label the connections to China, Qatar and the UAE (Aby Dhabi, by AB) as pretty "intercontinental", too. Then there is the EWR-flights by UA and YYZ (seasonally) by Rouge.

Tegel lacks the parking-space for more intercontinental jets, which is the main constraint for long-haul.

Toryu the Qatar and United routes are the flights to other airline's hubs I mentioned earlier. The Air Berlin flights may have had reasonable load factors, but their yield is unknown. Given Air Berlin's losses over the years it is unclear how much money these and a lot of other routes were making. It is irrelevant now because there is no equivalent German airline likely to step in. Norwegian or someone similar might have given it a go in different times. But right now everyone is just scrambling to survive and starting a lot of new services is likely postponed to the indeterminate future.