Frankfurt Airport’s new Sky Line people mover has entered passenger service, adding a second automated rail link between the northern terminals and the future Terminal 3 in the south of the airport. The system is designed as a high-capacity, fully automated people mover using driverless vehicles.
The new line runs for about 5.6 kilometers between Terminals 1 and 3, with a scheduled journey time of roughly eight minutes and peak speeds advertised at up to 80 km/h. Another source on the initial soft launch between Terminals 1 and 2 mentions operational speeds of around 70 km/h on that section. The service is configured for a headway of about two minutes, enabling more than 4,000 passengers per hour and per direction.
The system complements the legacy SkyLine, which continues to operate between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 and is expected to focus on transfer passengers. In contrast, the new Sky Line is intended to handle broader passenger flows linking all three terminals.
The people mover uses 12 fully automated trainsets based on Siemens’ Airval technology. After several years of construction and testing, it began carrying passengers in a soft-launch phase on the section between Terminals 1 and 2, ahead of the planned opening of Terminal 3, expected around April 2026. Trains already run empty to Terminal 3 to prepare full operations.