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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Tegel is one of my favorite airports in Germany since I can reach it from central Berlin in 20 minutes by public transport and in the main terminal most gates are less than 5 minutes away from the entrance, so you could in theory arrive 40 minutes before your plane departs.

The building is very old of course and you can see that it far exceeds the capacity for which it was planned, still in terms of convenience it's hard to beat, and I'm not looking forward to having to fly from BER sometime in the future (though I'm pretty confident it won't fully open before 2025, if ever).

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I can only assume you've never been in a > 2 hour security queue during peak travel time due to Tegel's small departure gates / security staff / screening capacity, with a flight leaving in 40 minutes.

You must be mixing up the airports. Tegel is unique in that it has security and passport controls for each individual gate.

This allows you to arrive at almost the exact moment the gate closes because there will be no passengers for other flights in a queue with you. The gate agents can even see you going through security and will wait for a minute or so.

This is true except for Terminal C, which is indeed a mess.

I still like Tegel a lot, as it's very close to the West center of the city.

if you happen to arrive at tegel ahead of time or even worse your flight is delayed, you are screwed. Once in the security area there is little to no decent food nor shopping option.

And yet it's still better than JFK.

Indeed, Terminal C vs. A is a big difference.

My worst airport experience has been trying (and failing, twice; on consecutive days) to fly from Tegel Terminal C to Helsinki (EasyJet). My best airport experiences have been flying from Tegel Terminal A (Finnair) to Helsinki.

Unless a plane is delayed or cancelled at the last minute, which in TXL's case is frequent. This results in a gate full of too many people and a slow down moving anyone anywhere.

Singapore's airport also does right-before-gate screenings at 3 of its 4 terminals.

Unlike Tegel, though, the gate area and the screening areas are open spaces, with glass to separate. Tegel always feels a bit claustrophobic, and as a jet-lagged traveller my first time departing, I admit it took awhile for me to figure out where the hell I needed to go.

source: https://www.changiairport.com/en/airport-guide/departing/sec...

Sure I have but that's mostly a problem for terminal C in my experience, as the budget airlines fly from there and they seems to have a different ratio of personnel to passengers. Airlines that mostly serve business travelers usually have better gate positions and more staff.

It's not personnel, they have to stop the queues from moving through security in order to prevent over crowding in the gate rooms which, are always over packed full of people.

Berlin's awful setup results in delays across the region, it's no wonder other airports are reluctant to link there and divert to Frankfurt instead.

Agree, I once had a trip door to door between Berlin Prenzlauer Berg and Haidhausen (Munich‘s Prenzlauer Berg...) in 3 hours and 10 minutes. Everything worked beautifully and by chance I hopped between different modes of public transport in no time... Compare that to a trip from London‘s city center via Heathrow. In 3 hours you might just have worked your way to entering the plane.

Mayfair to t5 can be done in an hour often less.

If you're worried about security lines why not fly out of London City? Yeah it's all the way out on the east end, and yeah DLR is pretty gross, but getting from the train to the gate takes about 10 minutes.

The only public transport to Tegel is bus, unfortunately. Shoenefeld and BER have rail links.

Schönefeld requires an extra cost ticket, the Tegel bus works on your normal AB ticket (day pass or single ride). Having watched the addition of rail service to OAK (and SFO), I don't really see the attraction. In the case of Oakland, the bus was faster, half the cost, and dropped you off closer to the airport. With Tegel, the bus is relatively quick (around 20 minutes from the Hauptbahnhof) — my only complaint is the lack of ventilation and cooling onboard (which is often a problem on trains too).

Quite frankly New York has a similar problem. There is rail service to JFK but requires an extra cost ticket and it's a fairly long trip (moreso if you're taking the subway instead of LIRR). I'd be willing to take a bus if it got me there quicker for less money. Yeah, Newark has rail (but it doesn't run particularly late).

> I'd be willing to take a bus if it got me there quicker for less money.

It won't get you there quicker. A hypothetical non-stop direct bus route from most places in Manhattan to JFK would take around an hour under ideal conditions, about the same as the train already does. And in non-ideal conditions (around rush hour) and with multiple stops along the route, you would be looking at something like 2 hours, and worse on bad days.

There's a big caveat though: from Midtown. Getting to JFK from elsewhere in Queens (or e.g. Brooklyn) is a pretty circuitous route on the train. A bus could easily do that in less than two hours. On a good day a subway ride into Manhattan might take you half an hour. On a bad day…

I mean, look, I prefer rail, but not by so much that I'd ding Tegel (or Oakland) for not having rail connections. In Oakland the rail connector cost about half a billion dollars and required undoing a bunch of landscaping and road improvements. In the context of Berlin where you're talking about the Brandenberg airport being over budget and oft delayed, I simply don't see Tegel's transit connections as being shameful (or particularly bad).

And that extra ticket costs what, €3.50? The Airport Express can get you from Alexanderplatz to Schönefeld in 20 mins, it takes almost twice that to get to Tegel.

And that extra ticket costs what, €3.50?

For a single trip ticket, that sounds about right. If you're going to take any other trips that day a day ticket makes more sense and I think the difference is a bit larger.

The Airport Express can get you from Alexanderplatz to Schönefeld in 20 mins, it takes almost twice that to get to Tegel.

The TXL bus takes about twenty minutes from the Hauptbahnhof, and Alexanderplatz is three stops away on the S-Bahn (saving about ten minutes). Transiting to/from the Hbf gives you some extra transit connections as well. And as an added bonus, the TXL bus pretty much drops you at the gate.

Last time in Tegel my flight was an hour and a half late because there were insufficient personnel assigned to passport control causing half of the passengers to miss the boarding time. Not fun standing in a line 100% certain you're missing your flight because there's just one guy checking all the passports.

Instead of using some sort of announcement system employees would just yell at people at German, so once I had to yell back at them to speak English.

Just 2 things to remember from Tegel, by far the worst airport I've ever been to.

My Tegel story: Just landed after the last leg of my trip (originating from western Canada) waiting for luggage. Time passes. People start to become visibly annoyed. More time passes. Still no luggage. The next plane starts disembarking. Still no luggage. People beginning to get heated, lots of angry german being tossed around.

It turns out the airport hadn’t assigned a crew to unload the plane, and Lufthansa sent an entire plane’s worth of checked luggage to Reykjavik. Cue the whole plane having to be processed through lost luggage. That’s was a long day.

> employees would just yell at people at German, so once I had to yell back at them to speak English.

That seems odd. Would a German do the same in the US?

There is a high chance that a random traveler will understand English. The same chance for German is way lower, including in Germany.

Not in the US, but we like to do that in Spain.

Given that most European countries all speak different native languages but also speak widespread English as a common, second language, it seems a reasonable thing to request in an airport in a European capital where there are likely travelers from many different, non-German speaking countries.

I am traveling in Eastern Europe right now and I have definitely seen instances in airports where both the airport personnel and the the traveler were obviously not native English speakers however English was the only way they could communicate. It seems that English is the international language of air travel. At least for now.

Is German the most-spoken second language across the whole continent where the US is located?

Is German the most commonly spoken language in North America?

> Just 2 things to remember from Tegel, by far the worst airport I've ever been to.

It's among the worst airports, but still my favourite. Super fast public transport from center, with a cheap ticket, and fast security throughput. I need to reserve much less extra time for Tegel than any other airport, and side expenses never exceed the price of the flight itself (which can easily happen at many other European airports).

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