On January 29th we had our first OUT day of the current year and 18 of us travelled to Köln/Bonn airport for a tour , not exactly behind the scenes but more around the scenes . We had a very nice lunch at Café Goodman & Filippo in Terminal 1 where many of our members have landed from, departed to and greeted arriving guests from the UK so this part was all very familiar. Next to the café we were met by our guide Ellen and her young ,and I think very shy ,stagère. We all had to go through security, one half of the group being checked for explosives/drugs and the other half having standard baggage checks. We then boarded a bus and from then on all was pretty new. We were driven around the apron- I would have referred to it as the tarmac- and got an impression of the amount of cargo transported into Cologne every day. We saw lots of familiar-looking vegetables on pallets being unloaded from planes from Egypt and heard about the largest UPS hub outside the USA which employs 3000 people at Cologne airport alone. These cargo flights coming in during the night are the ones the residents in the area have to put up with. And Ellen reminded us that anytime we order online for quick delivery our parcels are probably on just these flights! So we felt suitably chastened. We got a brief history of the airport from its post world war II military status to the handover in 1957 to the German authorities for civilian use and the subsequent building programme. Terminal 1 opened in 1970 and Terminal 2 in 2000. All in all, about 14,000 people work in the airport and apart from the cargo and passenger flights we are familiar with it is also home to the Federal Government‘s planes- the ones the Angela Merkel takes, for example. Tactfully, none of us added the phrase-when they’re working! These, however, will move to the new airport in Berlin -when it’s finished! Several members were keen to see inside the hangar with the private planes and our very obliging driver stopped long enough for us to get a good look and there were some very classy looking ones. Having got a very reassuring run-down on the airport’s own fire brigade and their fast reaction times we learned that the airport keeps ferrets. I genuinely thought I had mis-heard but apparently the area – Wahner Heide- is full of rabbits whose burrows are dangerous for planes landing and taking off. So an expert (by sheer coincidence personally known to our chairperson Barbara) with his hunting dog and trained ferrets chases the rabbits out of their burrows, catches them and the airport sells them on to another part of Germany where the local rabbits have all died from myxomatosis! I was very tempted to say Now that’s a good story! But it seems it’s really true. My personal highlight was hearing about the plane which is parked between Terminal 2 and Parkhaus 3 which I’ve walked past so many times on my way to and from flights. It is a Zero G plane which was used for astronaut training flights including for our own local ISS astronaut , Astro Alex. The training consists of 22 parabolic flights within 2 minutes where the unfortunates in the plane are exposed to weightlessness repeatedly . I won’t write down what the victims of this training call the plane but you can ask me at the next meeting.

At the end of the tour we went back to Café Goodman & Filippo for tea/ coffee etc and our guide Ellen joined us. We learned a lot about her career in the airport administration which was also interesting . All in all, a lovely excursion and thanks very much to our programme organisers.