I know, I know: I'm an ant, so I'm a prime suspect. But I swear I had absolutely nothing to do with the many hills on the airport site! And anyway, everything it as it should be – even if our lovely airport site does look like the Maspalomas sand dunes on Gran Canaria.

Brandenburg is supposedly as flat as an ant under the sole of a shoe. But that's about as correct as the view that the earth is not a sphere.

Obviously, when you're trundling over the fields in a tractor you don't notice the ground going up and down very much. But try riding across our beautiful countryside on a bike – you should have heard Antonia and me puffing and panting on our bike ride! And if you want to build a modern capital city airport, you cannot have any hills or hollows along the 4000-metre runway.

That's why we've been completely remodelling the airport site for months now. We've taken away hills up to five metres in height and filled in hollows. To say nothing of the excavations for conduits and lines and the piles of earth they turned up. We now have two interim earth stores: one for topsoil and the other for mineral-rich subsoil. They are our “dunes”.

By the time the airport opens in 2011, the Brandenburg dunes will naturally have long since disappeared. Then we'll all be able to fly very quickly and comfortably to Gran Canaria from the BBI.

print version berlin-airport.de (Copyright Berliner Flughäfen)