Main Airport, Frankfurt, Germany. Photo / Getty Images
Main Airport, Frankfurt, Germany. Photo / Getty Images
Graham Reid gets up close to big planes in Germany.
Those of us who are lucky enough to travel — and, given the crowds at airports everywhere, that seems just about everyone — have our list of common complaints: delays, queues, longer and longer walks to the gate (hasanyone ever had Gate 1?), kids running around the baggage carousel, important but inaudible announcements . . .
Usually people grumble quietly to themselves and sometimes other passengers, but some bellow at the staff — about delays because of weather or technical problems — whom they consider servants or a lower life form.
Yet when you consider all the things that could possibly go wrong with international travel it's a wonder any of us get off the ground at all. And many airports offer quiet spaces, prayer rooms, indoor gardens, outdoor restaurants and bars to watch the planes take off.
There's a museum in one area of Seoul's airport at Inchoeon.
Recently we were in Frankfurt which opened in 1936 and today boasts being the busiest airport in Germany. It is the fourth largest in Europe and in 2023 — when the third terminal opens — it will be the biggest with about 75 million passengers a year.
We had time to kill there before a flight so took their cheap (€7) 45-minute airport tour, and it was terrific.
Okay, it was in German. But as there were just another local couple and their kid, nd the three of us (two of whom have a German surname and get the odd sentence), our delightful young guide Anina offered a translation.
For $20 I was as close as I'll ever get to the underbelly of the vast, six-storey-high A380-800 airbus and watched a few of them burn rubber on the tarmac when they landed just a way off.
At Terminal One, Frankfurt Airport, Frankfurt, Germany.
Our bus tour — which started with a rigorous security check even President Trump might approve of — took us around and beneath the sleek flying machines of some of the 80 airlines that fly into Frankfurt, out on to a runway, past massive and rather beautiful-looking hangers for the big birds, then stopped for a while as one plane after another arrived or departed.
From the outside and at a distance, Frankfurt Airport seems a quiet and orderly place, but more than 80,000 people work there and it is Germany's largest employer.
You can get a bit boggled by figures but some are impressive: there are 500 different companies and employers in the complex (yes, there's even an on-site lawyer and dental clinic); runways are 4000m long; the A380 fuel tanks hold 320,000 litres and the airport's depot has 10 tanks holding 186 million litres of jet fuel; there are 400 firefighters working four shifts . . .
Frankfurt offers a number of interesting and time-filling tours, including a two-hour airport by night sunset option, a 100-minute fire department tour and even a birthday party tour for children.
If you've got time to spare and wonder what it must be like out there on the tarmac where people wear fluoro-jackets and huge noise-cancelling headgear, a Frankfurt Airport bus tour takes you there and allows you to stare up at the enormous A380 and wonder, "How . . . ?"
CHECKLIST
GETTING THERE Emirates flies from Auckland to Frankfurt, via Dubai with return Economy Class fares from $1849.
