Summary of the airport

The architecture: With its echoes of regional architecture, BBI will clearly find its place in the region near the German capital. The terminal with its divided facades and clear geometric forms continues architectural elements ranging from the Prussian designer Karl Friedrich Schinkel to the Bauhaus style. The central access road, which will be an avenue lined with trees, picks up characteristic features from the townscapes and countryside of the Berlin/Brandenburg region.

Check-in: The days of paper tickets are numbered. E-tickets will dominate the airport world of tomorrow. As a result, there will not only be 80 check-in desks, but also about 200 airline check-in machines at BBI. Passengers will then be able to use them to print out boarding cards themselves, e.g. for flights booked on the Internet.

Retail/Non-aviation: Modern journeys start at the airport of tomorrow after the security check. Shops and restaurants, cafes and bars will be just as important at BBI as runways and check-in desks. For visitors to the German capital region there will also be top-class catering and retail facilities at BBI, also outside the security zone, as well as hotels and conference centres in the Airport City area, the service centre in the middle of the airport grounds.

Security: Airports of tomorrow will have even more stringent security areas than today. The European Commission beefed up the security rules for airports at the beginning of 2006 once again. For example, these make personal checks on staff working at airports obligatory. As many as seven different flows of passengers (incoming, outgoing, transfer, EU, non-EU, Schengen, non-Schengen) will have to be strictly separated in future. The BBI planners have already taken these complex requirements into account in their work even before the ground-breaking ceremony takes place. This also enables them to minimise any loss of time possibly caused by tougher security rules. Modern identification processes will play an important role at BBI. Berlin Airports is already successfully testing biometric identity processes at the airports Schoenefeld and Tegel.

Ideal traffic connections: BBI will also have the best possible connections on the ground. It will be easy for passengers to reach the airport by car using the A113 motorway or the four-lane B96a A-road via a central terminal access road. Rail travellers will alight trains at the underground terminal station after the 20-minute trip from the main train station and will be able to reach the terminal in a matter of seconds using the escalators and lifts.

Environmental compatibility: Environmental compatibility and low operating and maintenance costs play a major role in the plans for BBI. Noise levels caused by aircraft on the ground are largely absorbed by the airport site because of the midfield concept. The planners have attached particular importance to ideal energy consumption in the individual buildings. The plans not only include the use of highly innovative heat recovery systems, but renewable energy systems have also been integrated – e.g. geothermal energy or cooling systems using rainwater. An ecological building supervision process will minimise environmental pollution during building work (e.g. resettling protected species of animals, protecting trees and bats). Comprehensive compensatory measures (e.g. replanting trees to replace felled trees on the construction site) will accompany the expansion of the airport.