The following article is from our September 2005 issue.

An Airbase Comes Back to Life. Once home to 75 U.S. F-16s, Hahn Airport now serves as hub for low-cost flights. By Uwe Siemon-Netto

The U.S. Air Force brought prosperity to Germany's depressed Hunsrück region and left a great legacy - even more prosperity.

Here's a question: How do you transform backwoodsmen from Germany's Far West into travel-savvy sophisticates? How do you make farmers, who used to consider a 50-mile trek from their homes to Koblenz the journey of their lifetime, hop a plane and take off to the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Fjords of Norway on a whim?

This is what you do: You turn 1,280 acres of forests and pastures in the harsh Hunsrück region into a U.S. airbase where Americans will station warplanes. Forty years later, they withdraw and hand the base over to German authorities, who convert it into a hub for low-cost passenger travel. And, bingo, you have a new species of rural jetsetters who, in between milking cows, search the Internet for the best deal to destinations they had only previously known from television.

"The other day, my daughter flew to Stockholm in the morning, returned at night, went back to Stockholm the next morning and was home again for supper," said Werner Kuhn, an executive of a building society, "This was cheaper than sleeping in a hotel."

Welcome to funky Frankfurt-Hahn Airport, once known to tens of thousands of U.S. airmen as the place where their 50th Tactical Fighter Wing was stationed from 1953 to 1991, ready to defend the Old World with 75 F-16s against the Soviet threat.

Now Russia's Aeroflot has four DC-10 cargo planes stationed there along with their crews, which the locals find friendly enough but more alien and definitely thirstier than the Americans. Many old-timers pine for the days when American and German kids played on the same soccer team and conversed in the local dialect that calls potatoes "Grummbeeren" rather than "Kartoffeln."

Often airmen return to Hahn on a sentimental journey; occasionally some retired senior officers show up for a tipple at the still-existing "Commanders' 'Stammtisch,' " or regulars' table, founded in the 1980s by Rudi Schütz, then head of a police academy, for members of the American and German brass. And they are amazed at what they see.

Their old apartment blocks sit empty, waiting to be razed; there's no use for them anymore, primarily because cancer-causing asbestos had been used in their construction. But the old Bachelor Officer Quarters is still there; it's now the InterCityHotel that still has the feel of an upgraded Bachelor Officer Quarters.

The base chapel has also survived - as an auditorium for the regional academy training senior police officers, Schütz's former place of work. It has recently moved from Koblenz into the former American high school and its students are lodged where U.S. airmen once dwelled.

Then look what's parked outside much of the old base's housing units - not the VW Beetles or Chevrolets with special license plates issued to service personnel but automobiles from all over western Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium and tiny Luxembourg, all belonging to passengers of, say, $50 flights to faraway destinations, Iceland, for example. Iceland? Yes, many of its citizens live - one wonders why - in Luxemburg not far from Hahn Airport from where they take off to visit home.

Of course, like the Finns who fly here in large numbers to stock up on cheap liquor, these Nordic islanders make up only a small portion of the 10,000 passengers taking off every day from Frankfurt-Hahn, as the airport is officially and somewhat audaciously titled, even though Frankfurt is a 90-minute bus ride away. That's because Frankfurt's airport authority, called Fraport, runs Hahn, leading it from one stunning success to the next.

Four years ago, some 450,000 travelers passed through Hahn, whose Terminal 1 used to be the American officers' mess. By the end of this year, the annual number of passengers is expected to reach 3.5 million. And most are the kind of customers any business would wish for - young and educated; their average age is 33, and many are students dashing, for instance, to Rome in one of Ryanair's gleaming new jets, or to Budapest with Wizzair, both for as little as $60 roundtrip.

Ireland's Ryanair and Hungary's Wizzair are the main players here, shining examples of entrepreneurship in Germany, a land in need of economic renewal. But don't lecture Hunsrück farmers on entrepreneurship; they have been practicing it in many ways ever since the first Americans showed up here back in 1953.

When the U.S. base went into operation, Ute Schüler's peasant parents built an inn in the village of Sohren called Schinderhannes, which is now one of the finest hotels in the neighborhood. Back then, it was a place where airmen danced with local maidens and had fistfights with "Hamburger Zimmerleute," members of an ancient German journeymen guild of carpenters in wide-bottomed black trousers moving from construction site to construction site, the base included.

"We had to call the Air Police almost every night," recalled Schüler whose parents' had a soft spot for the military cops because they were "the most steadfast drinkers of all." In those days, when the average farmer here owned no more than 40 acres, the Hunsrückers learned to make the best out of living next to an airbase. They improved their homes to rent apartments to American families and others linked to the base, such as the 100 ladies in the village of Lautzenhausen where 16 bars "with theatrical performances," meaning strip shows, had sprung up.

"We did well by renting rooms to them," recalled Wolfgang Jakobi, then Lautzenhausen's mayor, now chief of maintenance at Frankfurt-Hahn Airport. "More than that, it was fun ogling the scantily clad girls sunning themselves on our meadows as we drove our tractors to our fields. The girls' bosses were good customers too. One lived in our house, an Israeli named Mike. One day I told him, 'Look, Mike, the village sports club needs new uniforms, can you help?' 'Sure,' he said, rolled down one sock and handed me a wad of DM 500, the equivalent of a German worker's monthly income then."

The bars are gone now, as are the girls. But Hunsrück entrepreneurship has survived. People working at the airport now live in village apartments once occupied by military families from the base that also employed 700 German civilians. "Now 2,500 work here, and more jobs are opening up every day," said Brigitte Kunz, a public relations officer at Hahn. Dolefully, Kunz recalled a melancholic moment
on Aug. 27, 1991, when she stood on the tarmac, waving farewell to the last F-16 and its pilot, Maj. Gen. George W. Norwood, the base commander.

"After that, everything seemed dead here," she said. "We were miserable, having had such a wonderful time with the Americans. I loved their barbecue parties, and the sour cream they brought me from their commissaries and, in my younger days, dates with good-looking airmen driving fancy cars."

But, hey, things turned out better than the locals could have hoped for. If there was one thing the down-to-earth Hunsrückers have in common with Americans, it is can-do mentality.

One stellar example of this is Günther Bohr, 61, who in 1986 bought two secondhand buses to drive kids to schools and tourists to the nearby Mosel Valley while still tending to his cattle. In 1999, two years before Hahn became Ryanair's German hub, Bohr anticipated what was coming and went into high gear, building up a fleet of 52 Mercedes buses, a gas station, a restaurant and a hotel, which will be followed by a shopping center. And he gradually hired 120 employees.

You need a ride from one of Hahn's two terminals to a parking lot? You take Bohr's Shuttle. You want to go to downtown Frankfurt? A Bohr bus will get you there for $14.50, sometimes with the boss at the wheel. You are a Hunsrück farmer in need of a day away from your herd?

Well, Ryanair will fly you to Rome in the morning; there a Bohr bus will be waiting for you at the airport for a guided tour through the Eternal City, with a papal audience thrown in. At night you are back home in your own bed - all for $120. What? The Pope included? Yes. He's guaranteed because Bohr's day trips to Rome only take place on Wednesdays - and that's when the Holy Father gives a general audience.

Meanwhile Bohr has set his sights on an even bolder venture. As annual passenger figures at Hahn keep creeping up, Bohr figures that once they reach 8 million, the abandoned old rail line to Frankfurt will have to be revived. "You can't have a major international airport without a train connection," said Bohr, perhaps a future railroad baron.

Of course around Hahn, as anywhere, progress in mass travel has its foes, for example, the environmentalists doing battle against the extension of the airport's runways to accommodate jumbo-size cargo planes. Actually, it's not so much the lengthening of the tarmac they object to as plans to cut down the tall fir trees close to the takeoff point because they are the venue for get-togethers of female bats belonging to the endangered "barbastella barbastellus" species.

That is a serious matter in Germany, one that warrants protracted negotiations between nature lovers, state and airport authorities. But then, said Kuhn, one has to allow for certain sacrifices if one wants to succeed.

The success they have in mind in Hunsrück is this: With low-cost flights to 28 destinations such as Tampere, Finland, Girona, Spain, Pescata, Italy and Rzeszow, Poland, "Hahn is in the process of turning all of Europe, East and West, into one great village," said Kuhn.

- Uwe Siemon-Netto is a Washington-based columnist and university lecturer.