Departure
93%
vs 95% ▼ 2
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Saarbrücken Airport (EDDR), also known as Ensheim Airport, is a public international airport serving the Saarland capital of Saarbrücken in southwestern Germany. It has a single hard-surfaced runway equipped with an ILS and remains an interesting case study for simulator pilots as one of the first airports in the world to be controlled remotely, via a tower centre in Leipzig some 450 km away.
Saarbrücken Airport, known locally as Flughafen Saarbrücken or Ensheim Airport, lies in the district of Ensheim on the eastern edge of the city of Saarbrücken, capital of the German state of Saarland. It is a modest but fully international airport handling scheduled and charter flights to destinations across Germany and southern Europe, and is notable to simulator pilots for its long single runway with ILS and for being controlled by air traffic controllers working remotely from a digital tower centre hundreds of kilometres away.
The airport sits in southwestern Germany close to the borders with France and Luxembourg, within the Langen Information region; traffic is advised by Langen Information on the AFIS frequency and by Langen Radar for approach guidance. The nearest major international airport is Frankfurt, roughly 165 km to the northeast; Zweibrücken Airport, a former military field, lies about 40 km away and was historically a competitor for the same traffic.
Saarbrücken has one physical hard-surfaced runway, 09/27, lit for night operations. Runway 09 is 6,342 ft long and Runway 27 is 6,202 ft long; Runway 27 is additionally equipped with an ILS for instrument approaches.
Pilots should expect to work Saarbrücken Ground/Rollkontrolle on 118.555 MHz, Saarbrücken Tower/Turm on 118.355 MHz, and the aerodrome ATIS on 125.48 MHz. Langen Information provides AFIS-type advisory service on 123.525 MHz, and Langen Radar offers radar service on 129.675 MHz. Since 4 December 2018 air traffic control for Saarbrücken has been delivered remotely from a remote tower centre in Leipzig, some 450 km away, using 360-degree and 190-degree camera views, pan-tilt-zoom tracking and infrared imaging to give controllers an out-of-the-window picture of the field.
Aviation at Saarbrücken dates back to 17 September 1928, when flying began from the original Saarbrücken-St Arnual Airport; the first aircraft to use that field was a Lufthansa service from Frankfurt en route to Paris. Through the early 1930s Lufthansa, together with the French operators SGTA (Lignes Farman) and Air France, ran a summer Paris-Saarbrücken-Frankfurt-Berlin service, and routes onward to Karlsruhe, Munich, Vienna and Budapest were added. St Arnual's poor site meant winter operations were impractical and the field suffered frequent weather problems, leading to its closure in 1939 in favour of a new airport under construction at Ensheim. The outbreak of the Second World War prevented the new field opening, and after the war the Saarland came under French administration, during which the airport did not operate; German control was restored in 1957. The Ensheim airport finally opened in 1967 after years of reconstruction, and by 1972 Saarbrücken was one of seventeen airports in Germany offering international flights. Passenger numbers peaked at nearly 500,000 in 2005, but the airport faced competition after 2006 from the newly converted former military airfield at Zweibrücken, roughly 40 km away; a widely reported incident that year, in which a Hapagfly flight from Heraklion twice failed to land at Saarbrücken in wet conditions before diverting to Zweibrücken's longer runway, prompted Hapagfly to move its operations there entirely. Zweibrücken later ran into financial and legal difficulties over illegal subsidies and filed for bankruptcy in 2014, after which several airlines, including TUIfly from summer 2015, shifted their leisure flights back to Saarbrücken.
Saarbrücken continues to handle scheduled and charter services, including flights operated by DAT, Eurowings, Ryanair and SunExpress, with Luxair using the field as a secondary hub because of its proximity to Luxembourg. Air traffic control has been provided remotely from a digital tower centre in Leipzig since December 2018, part of a European research programme that has since been extended to other German airports.
