Air Berlin: Berlin to Chicago and New York, July 2015

A last item in the series of box-light billboard adverts at Berlin Tegel last summer: one of the undoubted pride of the German capital's operations, the hometown Air Berlin's widebody non-stops to Chicago and New York JFK. As mentioned earlier this week, Berlin has somewhat curious commercial aviation arrangements. These reflect in turn, the situation in the largely decentralized Germany as a whole, for that matter, where the dominant flag-carrier Lufthansa somewhat underserves large metro areas like Hamburg and the Rhein-Ruhr by concentrating a classic hub-and-spoke system in all-powerful Frankfurt and the highly-important but rather out-of-the-way Munich. This leaves the country's largest urban center and unquestionably one of the most important capitals of Europe with only a handful of long-haul options.