It's no secret: Munitions dating from the Second World War are buried under the airfield at Tegel Airport and could pose a threat to planes veering off the runway. Berlin's Senator for Urban Development, Ingeborg Junge-Reyer said work on cleaning up the remaining grenades and bombs will start in the spring, the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper reported on Friday.

The excavation work is to bring the airport in line with standards from the United Nation's International Civil Aviation Organization. They stipulate that larger planes like the Airbus A 330, which already fly to Tegel, will need wider runways.

Bomb clearance work took place at Tegel in the 1960s and '70s, before building work to expand the small wartime airport. The new work would bring Tegel up to the relevant UN standards.