Tempelhof Airport

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The airport inside the American sector of Berlin that carried the largest share of the airlift of 1948–49, and an unusually literal illustration of what the blockade was. Tempelhof sits close to the centre of the city, hemmed in by apartment blocks, with a vast curved terminal building of the 1930s whose canopy allowed aircraft to be unloaded under cover; approaches were made over the rooftops on a tightly disciplined pattern in which aircraft landed at fixed intervals and any pilot who missed an approach returned to base with his load rather than circling, because circling would have collapsed the timetable. The airlift as a whole used three twenty-mile-wide air corridors agreed in 1945 between Berlin and the western zones, and Tempelhof, Gatow in the British sector and Tegel — built in the French sector during the operation itself — were its destinations. The airport closed to traffic in 2008 and the airfield is now a public open space.