Frankfurt Main Airport
Facts on FRA
Frankfurt is Germany's busiest airport for passengers and also Europe's busiest for air cargo, handling over 2 million tonnes of freight a year.
Source: Wikipedia
The city in the airport's name means "ford of the Franks". Records from 794 call it Frankonovurd, or Vadum Francorum in Latin — the Germanic tribe of the Franks plus Furt, a ford, where the river Main was shallow enough to wade across.
Source: Wikipedia
The airport's official name in the German aeronautical publication is Frankfurt Main Airport, keeping the river suffix that Germans have attached to the city regularly since the 14th century — it distinguishes this Frankfurt from Frankfurt an der Oder, a much smaller city on the Polish border.
Source: Wikipedia
As of 2022, Frankfurt served 330 destinations across five continents, more nonstop routes than any other airport in the world, all while its grounds remain wrapped by the Frankfurt City Forest (Frankfurter Stadtwald).
Source: Wikipedia
Frankfurt's first airport was Rebstock, an airship port established in 1912 near the trade fair grounds. By 1933 the city had crept up around it and there was no room to grow, so a search began for a new site; the replacement airport opened on 8 July 1936.
Source: Wikipedia
The south side of the airfield spent sixty years as Rhein-Main Air Base, the main western terminal for the American side of the Berlin Airlift after the Soviets cut off West Berlin on 24 June 1948. The US handed the base back on 30 December 2005; Terminal 3 now stands on it.
Source: Wikipedia
Frankfurt has four runways but only three point east–west. Runway 18, the West Runway, is 4,000 m long and can be used in one direction only, for departures. The Northwest Runway opened on 20 October 2011 and lifted the airport from 83 to 126 aircraft movements per hour.
Source: Wikipedia
One of the world's great hubs is closed overnight. On 11 October 2011 the Hessian Administration Court banned flights between 11pm and 5am, overriding a 2007 state permit for 17 scheduled night flights; Germany's Federal Administrative Court confirmed the ban on 4 April 2012.
Source: Wikipedia
Frankfurt's long-distance railway station, opened in 1999, is wedged between the A3 motorway and a four-lane trunk road and is the terminus of the Cologne–Frankfurt high-speed line, where trains run at up to 300 km/h. About ten trains an hour leave the airport in all directions.
Source: Wikipedia
The airport covers 2,300 hectares (5,683 acres) and handled 63,186,114 passengers, 2,071,665 tonnes of cargo and 460,272 aircraft movements in 2025. Its oldest terminal, Terminal 1, opened on 14 March 1972 under the name Terminal Mitte and now has 103 gates.
Source: Wikipedia