Killing Tegel
Tegel was closing. After decades as Berlin’s main airport, it was scheduled to shut down once BER opened. The only thing that actually made it good was that it existed within the city. You could get there in twenty minutes on a single transit ticket—A and B sections, no surcharge, no long journey to the edge of civilization.
That’s rarer than it should be. Most major cities have multiple airports because one location isn’t enough, and because redundancy matters when things go wrong. Berlin was doing the opposite—consolidating everything into BER, a massive project south of the city that had already become famous for catastrophic mismanagement. The plan was to kill Tegel and make everyone dependent on one airport.
People wanted to keep both airports running, which made obvious sense. Tegel made money every year. The arguments were solid: redundancy matters, proximity matters, a city shouldn’t strangle itself for the sake of modernization. But it was always going to close. These are decisions governments make after long meetings about progress and efficiency—decisions that look brilliant on paper until you’re actually trying to get somewhere and it takes twice as long.
I didn’t fly from Tegel much, but I understood why people fought for it. It was a small thing—the ability to leave your apartment and be at the gate before your coffee got cold. The efficiency wasn’t romantic, but it mattered. It was infrastructure that worked so well you barely noticed it. Then it was gone, and suddenly everything was harder, and you realized what you’d been taking for granted.
Tegel closed. BER eventually became functional, sort of. The city moved on. Most people forgot there was ever another option. The practical gets invisible until it disappears, and the new becomes inevitable, even when the new is clearly worse. That’s how infrastructure works in cities.