Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport has been given by a last minute reprieve by a Berlin court, and will now stay open until at least 2006. The airport was due to be closed by the Berlin International Airport Authority in October, but the move faced legal opposition from general aviation companies who use the airport.

Sebastian Pingel, operations manager of TAG Aviation and an opponent of the closure said he was ‘delighted’ with the decision, whilst Peter Andreas, md of charter firm Bizair, criticised the way the case was handled. He said: “The point is that the whole procedure the airport authorities used was illegal. The court said that it was exactly the wrong way to close an airport, and that it was not legal, so they lost.”

A spokesman for Berlin International Airports said the authority had wished to close Tempelhof as it was making a loss of over 15 million Euros a year, and it had wished to consolidate its operations at Tegel and Schonefeld Airports.

Andreas dismissed arguments that the airport needed to close as it was deserted and losing money. He said: “The authorities have said for 10 years they’re going to close the airport and because of that more and more airlines left or didn’t come to the airport. It was a vicious circle.”

Andreas said he expected companies to be attracted back to Tempelhof by the court’s decision, and hopes the authorities could be persuaded to keep it open as a viable city operation. Described by British architect Norman Foster as ‘the mother of all airports,’ Tempelhof was commissioned by Albert Speer and was completed in 1941.