What a Disaster! The Story of Berlin Brandenburg Airport.

Have you heard of the term “German efficiency”? Well, this is NOT a term that applies particularly well to the development and launch of Berlin Brandenburg Airport. Stay tuned!

Our Connections:

Social:

Download the FREE Mentour Aviation app for all the lastest aviation content

Below you will find the links to videos and sources used in this episode.

Sources

[BerndGiegerich]

During the construction phase, we had discussions in Germany if it wouldn't be easier to move Berlin closer to an already existing Airport than continuing with BER :-)

[leomannisto]

I was hired as a refueler at the BER in 2012.

I remember the pilots complaining that the docking displays were too low during the test run. Then they raised the docking displays with concrete blocks and the tugs didn’t fit between the nose gear and the block. So they painted the stop lines further away. As a result the 737 couldn’t be refueled because the main gear stood on the fuel pit…

Ended up refueling planes in Tegel 😂

[hyperthreaded]

A few years ago some developers from Berlin (I think) created a mobile game to commemorate the BER disaster, called "Airport Construction Manager" or something. The objective of the game was to build an airport using the maximum amount of public money possible. There was an endless string of problems and delays that kept coming up and you had to hire more and more external contractors with questionable reputation to fix them. I think the game was programmed in such a way that it was actually impossible to ever complete the construction.

[berlincoachdrivergoescreat]

Being a coach driver in Berlin, I would like to point out that the closest you can get to the entrance of BER with a full size coach is a distance of about half a mile. There is a large parking space for busses there, but with no roofs, no toilets basically "no nothing" for all shuttlebusses and long distance coaches arriving and departing at BER. Passengers have to walk that half mile outside past several hotels under any weather condition to get to the airport building. Last year I found myself basically stranded with one of my passengers, an elderly man with two huge suitcases and a walking disability. At 05:00 AM I tried calling a taxi from - "BER Terminal 1" - to - "BER Terminal 1" - which, of course, never came. The dispacher didn´t take my request seriously. Finally I could stop a taxi on my own and it was possible to get the my passenger to his flight. At the former Berlin airports, Tegel and Schönefeld, it was of course possible to stop directly in front of the building.

[CeleonA]

I myself worked at the construction site of BER for a few weeks during the later stages. First thing ive noticed were a group of electricians from eastern Europe of whom sadly only one guy was speaking a bit german and english. (I believe they came from Hungary or Slovakia but cant tell for sure) They were basically pulling already installed network cables back out of the ceiling of the terminals. Ive asked them why they were doing this and that one guy who understood me and spoke a bit of german explained to me that the previous company which installed the cables did it all wrong. Wrong type of data cable, most of them without proper labeling or documentation so no one except them knew from where to where those cables were actually going. That previous company bascially only employed workers from several different temp agencies and in the end they lost their contract for incompetence. But that only after many months of work. The other company got hired to replace them and fix the mess that the others had done, which was an unbelievably cumbersome and time consuming work because of that sloppy documention. I also saw completely wrongly installed cables of the fire protection system in those opened ceiling, basically violating several different common norms for installation of such cables at the same time. Obviously whoever did that, also had no expertise in such type work whatsoever. To me this all looked like the tried to build that airport with the lowest bidders they could find. It obviously did not even matter if those companies had no expertise in airport construction. Its was more important that they were cheap and offered lots of manpower at the same time. That combined with equally incompetent management of that construction site was the perfect recipe for disaster.

[JohnDoe-ltkl]

This story is incomplete without mentioning the ghost trains, operating to ensure that air circulates in the tunnels. And, by the way, I used the self-service check-in at BER yesterday. It works now.

[jonj-lab]

I worked on this airport. About 2 months before the summer 2012 opening date, it was discovered that there were no external phone lines running into the plant room of the terminal (someone tried to make a phonecall). I and many other Berlin entertainment industry types were brought in to drag multiple cables 2.6km through the train tunnel in double quick time to the station, whereupon other contractors took over. The station was indeed complete, but the escalators up to the terminal weren't. It was a joke. The land in front of the terminal entrance looked like the day after WW2, on the account that the storm water drainage on the whole site was done in too narrow a diameter of pipe, which caused the baggage area to flood several times in construction. So the whole lot had been torn up & replaced, and the landscaping hadn't even been started. The building's internal network cables were CAT 3 when CAT 5 & 6 were specced. The custom taps in the bathrooms wouldn't fit as they had a metric diameter pipe fitting (so there were no functioning passenger wash basins). Although Germany is a metric land, pipe diameters are still done in inches. That took 3 years to resolve. Then just after we'd finished there, they discovered that one of the head security guys on the contractors entrance (nice fella as it goes) was Germany's No.3 Al Queada terror suspect, so the whole site was shut down for a couple of weeks whilst the army did a fine tooth comb search of the entire site. Not that there were any good. Saw loads of people driving out with trees, shrubs and even a loo tied to their roof racks. No-one said a word! It's a diabolical passenger experience, especially arriving from a flight or to the airport by road. The only way Germany will recoup this money is to sell the film rights to this debacle.

[NTFTimo]

What's also import to know about BER Airport is, that it was originally designed to be the Hub of Air Berlin, at the time German's second-largest Airline. By the Time the Airport opened, however, the Airline didn't exist anymore.

[jane]

I’m so excited to watch this because I’m German myself and the Berlin Airport is such a joke within Germany and many people say it is proof of a stereotype about German officials and their plans within Germany going wrong and ending up costing more than double they anticipated.

[Kerndon]

I actually visited Berlin in 2012, landing at Tegel. There, a lot of people were just in the process of packing up everything (check-in machines, computers, vending machines, you name it). A few days later (still during my stay), the news hit that the opening of BER would be delayed. You cannot imagine the absolute chaos that befell Tegel, hurrying to unpack and re-install all the equipment that was supposed to go to BER.

[reinerjung]

The "fun" thing is: When you want to build a house in Germany - you know a small one, for one family - you need an architect, and two independent stress analysts who check the soundness of the plans BEFORE you start building anything. Apparently, you can build a whole airport without such checks. Also you do building inspections either by the architect, yourself or others to ensure no wrong parts are used to build the house. Strangely, such measures were not in place for the airport. You cannot get a beach bar container build in Germany without following the rules, but when the state founds a company and gives the "best" airline industry manager (who just ruined the national railways, yes this was his previous gig, he also ruined Air Berlin) the keys to the project. What could possible go wrong.

[annando]

Concerning the problems at BER: The mentioned points in the video are just the tip of the spear. Also there has been escalators that were too short, so there was a need adding stairs to them. There had been no overview concerning the numbering of the rooms, so a third of all 4, 000 rooms had been assigned wrong numbers. 750 displays had to be renewed long before opening, because they had been running since 2012 and were worn out. Also the computer systems had reached their end of life cycle before opening as well. There had been missing wires for automatic doors, ... the list really is endless and simply hilarious.

[petrairene]

This was not so much a problem of efficiency, but of incompetent decision makers trying to save money and hiring unqualified companies that promised to do it for cheap.

[StuartConsulting]

I am a retired electrical engineer now, but what left me in a fit of giggles was they couldn’t turn the internal lights off for this huge airport. The internal lights mostly used electronic “DALI” ballasts, and these are designed to be fail safe, if they don’t get the correct control signal, they default ON. An honourable feature so occupants will not be left in the dark if control was lost. But an entire airport reliant on one control system, no redundancy with independent zones or such ??? 😂

[saya-mi]

Yeah, I remember in high school, my german language teacher told us about Brandenburg airport being build. It was year 2010. Since then, I managed to graduate high school, graduate from university as german-czech translator/interpreter and spent two years working and Berlin-Brandenburg still wasn't opened then 😀

[conceptSde]

While the BER managers were struggling with all the things going wrong I regularly met one of the TÜV certification engineers, and each and every time he had new horrific stories to tell you would never expect to happen in a developed country. From my POV the main issue was the political decision to keep the project management in the local administration instead of contracting a project management company with plenty of experience in such a large and complex job. The idea was cost saving, but this went terribly wrong.

[srfiorini]

The pedagogic value of Brandenburg Airport history is probably greater than it's value as an airport at this point.

[Datznet]

It was fun: For years you could visit the half-finished new airport, and in spite forbidden run around freely and visit nearly every corner of the new airport, because the security was so dysfunctional and when you were seen there running around as a stranger they thought it's one of the lone plumbers, electricians or consultants visiting the site every some weeks.

[germansnowman]

One of my favourite anecdotes is that some escalators were installed but then had to be extended with a step as they were produced too short, which kind of negates the benefit of an escalator.

[heikepeike]

I lived in Berlin from 1991 to 2016, my favourite story around BER is that for nine years empty trains had to be driven to and from the airport to ventilate those tunnels. I imagine it like a Jim Jarmusch film.