Frankfurts new 2800m runway was inaugurated on 21st october 2011 by germanys chancelor A.Merkel. Her plane, an Airbus A319 of the german Luftwaffe, was the first one to touch down on the new tarmac. After 10 years of planning and ongoing fights with local residents the runway was finally built and is supposed to increase the airports passenger traffic by an estimated 50%.he runway was desperately needed to keep frankfurts airport at the top of the pack with Paris and London.The dark side of this project is a ban of traffic during the night which was implemented by court a couple of days ago. This is a tough hit for cargo carriers as most of the cargo is handled during the night. So far 17 flights were allowed between 24:00and 6:00 o'clock. Not much compared to other airports but enough to keep it going. This confronts companies such as Lufthansa with imense problems concerning their cargo. I just hope for them that this law will be banned again.

To be honest I will never understand people moving into areas situated right underneith approach paths of airports and then complaining about it afterwards. Just don't move there or stop complaining about the noise pollution!

Edit: I just found a nice aerial view of EDDF including the new runway on the left. Also nice to see the two new bridges going across the Autobahn.

The absolute night curfue in Frankfurt is disrupting a lot of airlines and cargo operators. The unfortunate situation is that the court assigned the ban with a 2weeks notice. These flight times and routes are connected to airport slots, overflight permissions and long term country contracts, that require months , in some cases years of negotiations and cannot be changed in two weeks. Now we have hundreds of trucks driving the cargo to the neighbouring airport of Cologne ( approx. 170 KM ) and planes leaving early from Frankfurt to fly to CGN to wait there for 4 hours before continuing on. I hope the courts will allow the return of the night flights in March of next year. The amount in discussion are 17 flights during the night ours. Anybody knows that night operations are a simple must for cargo and freight.

P.S. The people living around Cologne are not happy with the sudden increase of night operations. They were used to the amounts they had until now. They have allowed night ops.