Which aircraft were the last to take off from Berlin's Tempelhof Airport?

Tempelhof Airport, in the heart of Berlin, ceased operations on 30 October 2008. The last aircraft to take off from it before the final shutdown were a Junkers Ju 52 and a Douglas DC-3, two of the great transports of the 1930s. For the Ju 52, it was also a farewell to its old home.

In the 1930s Tempelhof was the hub of the Lufthansa network, from which all of Europe was served. The airline had made the Ju 52/3m its standard aircraft after receiving the first one in 1932, and by 1938 around 75% of all its air traffic was flown with this trimotor. Hitler's personal squadron was also based at Tempelhof, at one point gathering around 50 aircraft, most of them Ju 52s, including the Immelmann II with registration D-2600.

The Ju 52 that took part in the farewell belongs to the generation of aircraft still flying in the 21st century as historic airplanes, in air shows and sightseeing flights. Several of them survived thanks to post-war production: in France as the AAC.1 Toucan and in Spain as the CASA 352. The 2008 closure thus brought together, on the same runway, the two aircraft that best sum up interwar commercial aviation. Lufthansa had adopted it as its standard aircraft, and by the fourth quarter of 1932 it had already ordered the first eleven. In civil aviation, the Ju 52 served with more than twelve airlines, including Swissair, and in Norway the company DNL used it on floats on the coastal route from Oslo to Bergen from 1 June 1936; after the war it kept six aircraft in service until 1956. The Swiss Air Force had it in service from 1939 to 1982.