111 years of Hamburg airport
Hamburg airport is celebrating its 111th birthday. But you wouldn’t be in Germany’s largest port city if the airport hadn’t initially been built with reference to airship travel. Thus the “LZ-10 Schwaben”, a zeppelin carrying large quantities of airmail for the first time, made its first visit to Hamburg on 19 September 1911, coming from Münster and Bremen, and flew on to Berlin the same day.
After this initial spark, private donations were used to build a hangar for airships in Fuhlsbüttel, north of the Borsteller racecourse and west of the Alster river. From 1913, however, the airships had to share the 60 ha site with the aircraft, called aeroplanes, which also started the first airmail service with routes to Austria, Italy, England and France, amongst other things. (ah)