What would have replaced Tempelhof Airport in an undivided Berlin?

[Dr. Nodelescu]

You may have heard about the clusterfuck about Berlin's new single airport whose grand opening has repeatedly been postponed, this time due to firefighting issues. And as long as the essentially expanded Schönefeld airport (SXF) that will become Berlin Brandenburg International (BER) won't be opened, Berlin-Tegel (TXL) will continue to serve Berlin avation traffic.

Berlin having two major post-war airports to replace or at least outgrow Tempelhof Airport is of course a legacy of the Cold War. But both TXL and SXF have pre-war legacies that could justify their existence in timelines with a surviving Weimar or anything comparable. First of all, let's take a loot at the reasons why TXL and SXF were suitable airport bases after all.

TXL was on parts of the Jungfernheide (virgin's heath), hunting grounds for the Prussian kings and already clearly outside of Berlin's circle line in its northwest. Before the WWI and the Versailles Treaty forbidding Germany to rebuild its air force, airships used to be developed in this place. The Wehrmacht later used this place to train anti-aircraft warfare, so to speak. The actual birth of the later airport was the Berlin blockade. The having further landing grounds for the raisin bombers, Berliners quickly tidied up said grounds in 90 days. During the 60s and early 70s, TXL was built and all charter flights moved thereto from the overcrowded Tempelhof. Due to the Greens in Red-Green, the construction of the second terminal hexagon was avoided and after 1989/90, all expansion plans were halted due to TXL scheduled to be closed for a new single-airport (said BER) anyway. But as demand for Berlin flights skyrocketed and the completion of BER was postponed over and over again, many little provisory expansions were made after all eventually. So now the near-end TXL has five terminals that could never have had the harmony to the original hexagon draft. Oh my.

SXF was built on the grounds of an aircraft factory that started in the early Third Reich and whose owners also supplied the Bundeswehr after the war, though not from this place of course. After the war, the Soviets first used the Johannisthal airport before finally resorting to the nearby suburb of Schönefeld and later became East Berlin's city airport and was therefore the eastern counterpart to Tegel. If you wonder, SXF wasn't the only site proposed for Berlin Brandenburg International, but everything else would have been too remote from Berlin into the Brandenburg countryside.

Oh, and one word about Tempelhof: There used to be referendum to stop the closure of Tempelhof, but it didn't succeed. Interesting is the turnout: West Berliners were for keeping it open, East Berlin were against it and voters from the central boroughs were divided, but leaning against it eventually.


So here's the question: Which site would you have found more suitable for a single-airport for all of Berlin around the 1960s/70s if it hadn't been divided?

[Arachnid]

Very interesting post but not being a Berliner nor a city planner I have absolutely no idea. One factor is the direction of the runways and the main destinations. Ideally you don't want planes flying over the city, due to the resulting noise pollution and having planes take off west only to turn around and fly east is wasteful so one factor is going to be whether Berlin has more flights going East or West.

[Dr. Nodelescu]

OK, what if I said that these west-east movement were half-and-half?