Why does Lufthansa hub in FRA/MUC, and not Berlin and/or Hamburg?
Apr 18, 2018, 10:36 am
#61
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I had dinner with a former Hamburg senator (of the city, not LH) many years ago. His storytelling about the city was legendary, and one of the things he emphasised was that Hamburg was briefly considered for the capital of West Germany after the war. The political elite at the time felt that giving the capital to a major city would weaken the case for eventual unification, Hamburg's Senate had long decided that they did not want to be the capital of Germany anyway (too flashy, too much in-your-face activity). In the same way, Hamburg's Senate never really pushed for a major expansion of HAM, content that that was in Frankfurt. The port was the real pride of the city. And a couple of years ago the citizens voted in a municipal referendum to not bid for the Olympics.
Apr 18, 2018, 10:39 am
#62
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Sorry, but this is simply utterly wrong. Even if you include the international strength of Deutsche Bank and the domestic strength of drug business and illegal prostitution in the Bahnhofsviertel, Frankfurt will never be in the range of any of those world cities.
Apr 18, 2018, 3:48 pm
#63
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That might well be. Bonn was chosen, because it was (a) not as destroyed as other cities (b) could well be sold to the world as a preliminary administration seat until unification of the four occupation zones and (c) Konrad Adenauer could take the boat from his house in Rhöndorf to the Bundestag. This does however not change anything for Hamburg as an airport. HAM faces the problem that quite a bit of the airport not only crosses the city border but the state border. The suburbs of Fuhlsbüttel and Langenhorn were already at post war times quite populated and south of the airport you are close to Winterhude, Eppendorf and Alsterdorf. All these results in severe safety and environmental discussions. In other words: HAM never was a greenfield operation like eg MUC or to a certain extend FRA, but an historic airfield dating back to 1911 (and originally used for the Zeppelin). In the 1960ies they discussed to close the airport and replace it with a greenfield operation in Kaltenkirchen. This discussion came to an end only in 2013 and will certainly not started again because some Americans don't understand German and European issues.
