Flughafen (the airport district)

Frankfurt Airport is the largest in Germany, the fourth largest in Europe and thirteenth in the world. It handles close to 65 million passengers and more than 2.2 million tons of cargo a year, with roughly 640 flights taking off and landing every day. Lufthansa is based here, as are Lufthansa Cargo and Condor. About 62,000 people work on the site, which is more than any other Frankfurt district employs.

Aviation history here starts early. Frankfurt hosted an international airship exhibition in 1909 that drew 1.5 million visitors, and the world's first airline was founded right after it. The first airfield opened in Bockenheim in 1912, designed for airships and only later adapted for aircraft. Mail planes came first, but by 1925 the field was handling 2,357 aircraft and 5,500 passengers. The current site opened in 1936 as the Weltflughafen Rhein-Main, built in 18 months on 600 hectares of cleared forest, and was the departure point for the airship Hindenburg's final flight to New York in 1937.

Expansion has been contested for decades. The Startbahn West runway triggered mass protests, a hut village built by demonstrators in November 1980, thousands of legal challenges and years of confrontation before it opened in 1984. A further runway at the end of the 1990s cost another 300 hectares of forest, and the last one, in 2009, went ahead over renewed protest.

For passengers, the airport functions as a small city. Terminal 1, departures hall B, holds a shopping avenue of 68 stores, more than 60 of them open seven days a week, alongside the duty free shops. The service level is calibrated to people with a flight to catch: the optician can turn a new pair of glasses around in an hour, and the boutique will alter a dress in the same time, because each keeps its own workshop and tailor on site. Food runs from a bistro in the airport Sheraton through a Munich brewhouse to cheap Asian counters, with the Goethe Bar for a quiet cocktail and a sports bar in the hotel.