Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit (L), Matthias Platzeck (R)
Berlin:
The scheduled opening of Berlin's new main airport next month has been delayed indefinitely due to problems with fire protection measures, authorities said on Tuesday.
Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport, designed to replace the city's current two hubs, Schoenefeld and Tegel, was scheduled to welcome its first flights on June 3.
Airport Chief Rainer Schwarz said that he was now aiming for an opening "after the summer break", without setting a date.
He was joined at a news conference by Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit and Brandenburg state premier Matthias Platzeck, who said that he could not deny that he was "furious" about the shock announcement.
"This is not a good day for Berlin-Brandenburg airport, the citizens of our states and the many visitors to our region," he said.
"You can imagine that we did everything possible in the last few months to try to achieve an opening date of June 3" he added.
The massive construction project, on the site of the current Schoenefeld airport, has been dogged by delays and the original opening scheduled for 2007 has already been pushed back several times.
Berlin's airports are not the country's busiest airports. With Schoenefeld and Tegel together welcoming around 24 million visitors a year, they are small compared with the number of passengers at Frankfurt airport in western Germany.
But the new facility, built for about 2.5 billion euros ($3.3 billion), is intended to accommodate the sharp rise in air traffic to the region seen in the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification.
It estimates that it will service around 27 million passengers a year.
Berliners were already mourning the closure of Tegel, which is relatively close to the city centre and whose small, hexagonal main terminal was a 1960s relic that allows passengers to hop in or out of a taxi just outside their gate.
The new ultra-modern facility, complete with the money-spinning shopping mall common in modern airports, is on the capital's southeastern outskirts in the state of Brandenburg, and accessible primarily by rail.
Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport, designed to replace the city's current two hubs, Schoenefeld and Tegel, was scheduled to welcome its first flights on June 3.
Airport Chief Rainer Schwarz said that he was now aiming for an opening "after the summer break", without setting a date.
He was joined at a news conference by Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit and Brandenburg state premier Matthias Platzeck, who said that he could not deny that he was "furious" about the shock announcement.
"This is not a good day for Berlin-Brandenburg airport, the citizens of our states and the many visitors to our region," he said.
"You can imagine that we did everything possible in the last few months to try to achieve an opening date of June 3" he added.
The massive construction project, on the site of the current Schoenefeld airport, has been dogged by delays and the original opening scheduled for 2007 has already been pushed back several times.
Berlin's airports are not the country's busiest airports. With Schoenefeld and Tegel together welcoming around 24 million visitors a year, they are small compared with the number of passengers at Frankfurt airport in western Germany.
But the new facility, built for about 2.5 billion euros ($3.3 billion), is intended to accommodate the sharp rise in air traffic to the region seen in the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification.
It estimates that it will service around 27 million passengers a year.
Berliners were already mourning the closure of Tegel, which is relatively close to the city centre and whose small, hexagonal main terminal was a 1960s relic that allows passengers to hop in or out of a taxi just outside their gate.
The new ultra-modern facility, complete with the money-spinning shopping mall common in modern airports, is on the capital's southeastern outskirts in the state of Brandenburg, and accessible primarily by rail.
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