Thousands of Berliners are facing travel misery after ground crews at both the German capital's airports started striking early on Friday morning, leading to hundreds of flight cancellations.
Flight delays and cancellations are expected at several German airports, including the main hub Frankfurt, next Wednesday due to ground personnel strikes announced by a services union.
EU authorities have managed to smuggle dangerous weaponry through Cologne-Bonn airport, raising concerns about the effectiveness of security controls there.
The budget airline Ryanair is in negotiations with Munich Airport to start flying from the southern hub as part of a strategy to aggressively expand its German market-share.
A suitcase which caused police to shut down Düsseldorf airport in fear it was a bomb contained nine kilos of flour and cinnamon. Over 10,000 passengers were affected and 140 flights cancelled.
Five of Germany's 29 main airports have "serious safety defects", the country's pilot union said on Wednesday. Among the worst offenders were Weeze, near the Dutch border, and Memmingen near Munich.
Domestic German flights saw an unusually large drop in passengers in the first half of 2013 with strikes at the country's airports being blamed for the fall.
Managers at Düsseldorf and Cologne/Bonn airports cancelled hundreds of flights on Friday morning and advised passengers to expect long delays, as they were hit by another day of strikes by security personnel.
Frankfurt Airport, Germany's biggest hub, opened an extension of one of its two terminals on Tuesday as it seeks to boost capacity by six million passengers a year.
Eleven people were injured, four seriously, when a passenger plane at Germany's Cologne-Bonn airport filled with smoke shortly after landing on Monday morning, emergency services announced.
The people of Munich voted against the construction of a third runway in a referendum held on Sunday. The result is a sharp slap in the face for the leading parties in the Bavarian capital.
Around 3,000 taxis drove in convoy through central Berlin on Monday in protest at a huge rise in the extra fee for taking people to the German capital's new airport, set to open at the start of June.
The biggest move in recent German history has begun with staff at Berlin’s two airports starting to pack up 55,000 cubic metres of equipment ready to move to the capital’s new international airport.
German national airline Lufthansa cancelled around 200 Monday flights in and out of Frankfurt as workers at the country’s biggest airport said they were going on strike again.
At least 7,500 people spent a chilly Sunday protesting the night-time flight plans for Berlin’s expanded international airport at Schönefeld, complaining they only had 224 more undisturbed nights of sleep to go.
One of Germany’s police unions is calling for the controversial “naked scanners” at airports to be abandoned after a trial at Hamburg showed an unacceptably high rate of false alarms.
US prosecutors have filed murder charges against a Kosovo Albanian man accused of shooting dead two US airmen on a bus at Frankfurt airport in Germany.
