An AB Ticket

Tegel was the only airport I ever used where you didn’t feel punished for needing to fly. Twenty minutes from the city center. A standard Berlin AB zone transit pass—no surcharge, no C-zone extension—got you there and back. The terminal was a hexagon designed in the 1970s by Meinhard von Gerkan, with gates arranged so you could walk from security to your plane in under three minutes. It was genuinely pleasant, which made it an anomaly in the history of German infrastructure.

A campaign to keep it open ran in 2016 and 2017, built around the argument that BER—the new airport out in Schönefeld, already years behind schedule and billions over budget—shouldn’t be Berlin’s only option. An initiative called Berlin braucht Tegel collected signatures and pushed for a referendum. In September 2017, Berliners voted to keep it open. The referendum passed. And then it didn’t matter, because legally the airport had to close once BER opened, and BER eventually opened in October 2020, and Tegel followed three weeks later.

Every major city eventually sacrifices its convenient airport for the larger, more rational, more distant one. The argument for the new one is always framed in the language of logistics: capacity, growth, long-term planning. Nobody models the cost of an hour added to every journey, compounded across millions of trips, indefinitely. They count the planes but not the people dragging luggage through the C-zone surcharge.

Tegel closed on November 8, 2020. The hexagonal terminal still stands, occasionally discussed as a repurposing site. The runway is being converted into a tech campus. Whatever it becomes won’t be what it was: an airport in the city, designed around the person using it. The AB ticket that got you there no longer goes anywhere.