Photo Gallery The Contested Path to Flight Paths
Thousands of demonstrators gathered in December in the Brandenburg village of Kleinmachnow to protest proposed flight paths for Berlin Brandenburg International Airport (BBI), scheduled to open in June 2012. Another major demonstration is planned for March 12 at the site of the new airport in Schönefeld.
The announcement of flight paths for the new airport last September, which differed from those communicated to residents, spawned 14 different protest groups. The protestors used social networking on Facebook and Twitter to gather their forces, and have since united under one umbrella organization.
A worker lifts a suitcase from a conveyer belt at the new BBI airport earlier this month. Most construction at the airport is scheduled to be done by this fall, so airport workers can conduct six months of trial runs, a spokesman said.
Manfred Koertgen, director of technology at BBI Airport, stands near a control tower at the airport in early March. BBI, which will be Berlin's single airport when it opens next year, will have one terminal and two runways, with room for possible expansion.
A view of the main terminal at BBI in early March. The new airport sits adjacent to the Schönefeld Airport, once the main airstrip in the GDR. The night before BBI opens in June 2012, both Schönefeld and Tegel Airport, in northwestern Berlin, will close. Tempelhof Airport, which once operated out of the center of Berlin, closed in 2008.
Residents of the village of Zeuthen in Brandenburg gather at a protest in October against the newly announced flight paths. Like many of the communities affected by the flight paths, Zeuthen has grown considerably since the fall of the Berlin Wall, with many young families moving in to single family homes with yards. Protest organizers say about 40 percent of the residents moved there after the designs for the airport were completed. About 1,500 of the 10,500 residents are actively involved in the protest movement.
The construction site at the main terminal for BBI Airport in Schönefeld. The airport company, or Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld GmbH, has built at tower near the terminal, similar to the one at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin during its construction, where visitors can monitor the building's progress. An information center on site also has had a noise simulator, where residents could go and get an idea of how much noise their property will have once the airport is operational.
Protestors in the village of Teltow, southwest of Berlin, demonstrated last fall holding posters that read "Duped by Flights" among other things. Several residents of the area interviewed said they bought property after receiving assurances that their homes would not be affected by noise from the flight paths.
Berlin's mayor Klaus Wowereit, from the Social Democrats (SPD), has been thrown into the middle of the flight path controversy during a election year. Wowereit has said he was surprised by the routes announced last fall. Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) created headlines in February when she said at a meeting of her party in Berlin: Those responsible, whether at the Air Traffic Control (DFS) or wherever, have the duty to find a reasonable solution, based on what was promised.
Thousands of protesters marched in Stuttgart in Feb. 2011, to oppose the Stuttgart 21 project for replacing tracks and platforms at the city's main train station with new infrastructure underground. The rail project has the goal of creating new links between Paris, Vienna and Bratislava, but has been highly contentious. BBI flight path protesters distance themselves from the Stuttgart 21 movement. Most say they want the airport to be built -- they just don't want jets flying over their homes.
