Ryanair will be the first airline to take off from the new Terminal 2 at Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) in Germany.
After a series of embarrassing delays and cost overruns, BER finally opened in October 2020 in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with only Terminal 1 operational. The new airport replaced the city’s Tegel and Schoenefeld airports.
BER’s Terminal 2 will commence operations on March 24, 2022, with the start of the summer flight schedule.
Ryanair will be the main airline using Terminal 2, airport operator FBB said in a statement on March 10, 2022. After the first departure on March 24, the airline will gradually move all its flights there by the start of April.
Some flights from other airlines will also move to the new terminal, the operator said, reminding passengers to check which terminal they are flying from.
After a slow start to 2022, due to the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus impacting travel, passenger numbers showed signs of recovery in February, FBB said on March 4. The airport said 953,000 passengers flew through BER in February 2022. That’s far higher than the 147,000 passengers in February 2021, but still a long way off February 2019, when 2.54 million flew through Tegel and Schoenefeld.
BER Terminal 2, which can handle 6 million passengers a year, can be reached via the same train station and car parks as Terminal 1. From Terminal 1, passengers can reach Terminal 2 by foot.
Terminals 1 and 2 are located between BER’s two runways – 07L/25R and 07R/25L. The airport also has a Terminal 5, located to the north west, on the site of the former Schoenefeld airport. Terminal 5 is currently closed, due to the pandemic.