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Comment by emptyfile | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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

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

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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