With an operating area of 15.6 sq km, the airport is a city in its own right, offering extensive service facilities such as churches, hospitals and hotels, as well as conference and entertainment facilities, and shops, restaurants and service outlets on several levels.
The airport is located directly on the the busiest motorway junction in Europe and has direct S-Bahn and Intercity connections.
Above the long-distance train station, the Airrail Center Frankfurt, a nine-story complex with over 8 hectares of office space, 550-700 hotel rooms, restaurants and retail, was completed in 2010.
Frankfurt Airport is of great importance as a transfer airport by international standards (50% of all passengers are transfer passengers).
Modern technology ensures convenient, fast transfers. This is made possible above all by the baggage conveyor system (length approx. 67 kilometres), which ensures the smooth onward transport of the suitcases of departing and transferring passengers.
With the opening of Terminal 2, a building made of steel and glass, in 1994, a new traffic hub was created at Frankfurt Airport.
The automatically operated Sky Line trains are available for transfers from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2 (and vice versa).
With a lot of political celebrities, the new but also very controversial Northwest Runway (2.8 kilometers long, 45 meters wide - cost: 1.43 billion euros ) was opened on October 21, 2011.
The new runway is designed to increase the capacity of Germany's largest airport by 50 percent. It is intended exclusively for landings of small and medium-sized jets.
In a first step, the number of aircraft movements possible at the overall airport goes up from 82 to 90 per hour.
In the final stage, 126 take-offs and landings should be possible. This equates to a capacity of around 90 million passengers per year, up from 56.44 million last time in 2011.
With the new runway, Frankfurt will have two runways and one runway and one runway each.
Furthermore, Terminal 1 will be extended to the west and a Terminal 3 is currently under construction, from which flights are expected to take off from 2020.
