Admittedly I do feel just a little bit sad to see our old north runway at Schoenefeld being torn up. The runway has been in operation since the mid-sixties and easyJet was the last airline to land a plane on it. And that was on – please make a note! – 27 November 2007 at 10.05pm precisely. That means that, with immediate effect, the north runway is history. We have already taken a huge section of the old runway apart using a massive impact roller – not an easy job! After all, we did have a 60-centimetre layer of concrete to remove. But away with melancholy and lament. This is, don’t forget, all about the future and the name of the future is BBI. And to make sure that the BBI can be reached easily and quickly in the future, it is to have its own motorway link – and that’s why the good old north runway had to make way because it crossed the new motorway’s path. By the way, people will be able to drive all the way to Schoenefeld Airport from May 2008 because, by then, the last gap will have been closed in good time for the ILA. Then the Berlin city motorway and the southern Berlin motorway ring will be linked up. As you can see, every cloud has a silver lining and sometimes we have to part with something old so that we can have something new.

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