Berlin Schönefeld Airport ( Flughafen Berlin Schönefeld) )was an international airport near the town of Schönefeld at the southern border of Berlin, the capital of Germany, 18 km (11 mi) southeast of its city centre.
On 25 October 2020 the Schönefeld name and IATA code ceased to exist, marking its closure as an independent airport, with large parts of its infrastructure being incorporated into the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport (IATA: BER, ICAO: EDDB) as its Terminal 5 with its sections renamed to K, L, M and Q.
Schönefeld was the major civil airport of East Germany (GDR), and the only airport serving East Berlin. It will be merged into Berlin Brandenburg Airport when it opens in 2019 or later.
Berlin Schonefeld airport
This is already second airport in Germany I have visited (about a year ago I first landed at Frankfurt-Han airport. We get here from Riga using cheap Ryanair flight and used as middle point for further travels to Spain (Malaga).
We had a couple of hours (well more than 12) between our flight to Malaga, so we decided to use this spare time of Berlin sightseeing, and decided to get to the Alexanderplatz, for that we had to get to the nearest train station, which luckily is located nearby.
Construction connecting airport to train terminal
Parking lot near Berlin airport
Berlin Schönefeld Airport has seen a major increase in passenger numbers over recent years, which was caused by the opening of bases for both easyJet and Germanwings. In 2008, the airport served 6.6 million passengers.
Following German reunification in 1990, operating three separate airports became increasingly cost prohibitive, leading the Berlin legislature to pursue plans for a single airport that would be more efficient and would decrease the amount of aircraft noise from airports within the city. Therefore, it was decided to build Berlin Brandenburg Airport at the current site of Schönefeld Airport, originally scheduled to open in late 2012. For various reasons, mainly issues with the fire alarm/safety system, the opening has been postponed to 2016 or later.