Berlin Brandenburg: The airport with half a million outages contradicts the image of Germany's efficiency

Its structure impresses.

An air terminal with an entrance with huge expanses of glbad and an exit to a large station below that connects to a place in front.

On one side is a stylish and elegant hotel. And everything seems to be well connected in terms of car mobility to a highway.

But you stop, you look around and hear nothing but silence.

This description refers to the
Berlin Brandenburg or
BER, the new latest-generation international airport built to mark the resurgence of reunited Germany as a global destination.

This cost billions and had to be completed in 2012. But it has never been opened.

BER is for Germany a symbol of technical disaster.

It's a
"A national trauma" and a way to "learn not to do things," says Bent Flyvbjerg, global infrastructure expert

Not a single suitcase

No pbadengers have ever left the station, which currently rolls only one "ghost train" a day, to keep the air moving.

Nobody has stayed in this elegant airport hotel, which has a minimum of staff to dust off the rooms and open taps to maintain the water supply.

If you enter this large terminal, the strange atmosphere intensifies.

They carry out a daily rotation of the huge luggage straps to prevent them from deteriorating. Many of them are designed to handle constant arrivals.

Twists and turn without meaning. They have never loaded a single piece of real luggage.

The screens show flights arriving and departing, but using data from other airports in other parts of Berlin.

And others, tested to be used at the airport opening, must now be replaced or deteriorated without ever showing any landing or takeoff.

The company that manages the airport has promised to finally open next year with a delay of at least 8 years and exceeding billions of dollars.

What happened to Germany that is supposed to be one of the world leaders in efficiency and engineering?

An air wall

This is how a noble ambition to transcend a problematic past has been slowly stifled by political conflict, incompetence, and the greatest tangle of poorly installed cables in the world.

This stems from the long years of isolation of the Cold War in Berlin. Divided by a concrete wall, isolated behind the Iron Curtain, its links with the rest of the world were severely restricted by tensions between the Soviet Union and Western allies.

For Western Berliners, air links with the West, which had liberated their part of the city from Soviet rule in the late 1940s, were valuable but precarious, very limited and costly.

When I lived in West Berlin in the 1980s, I went and came by train.

For the inhabitants of East Berlin, imprisoned behind their wall by the communist government, the idea of ​​flying to the west or around the world was only a wild fantasy.

US President Ronald Reagan then arrived in West Berlin in 1987. His main goal was to ask Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "bring down this wall".

But in that same speech, another Reagan statement regarding the future of aviation went unnoticed.

"We hope for the day," he said, "that West Berlin can become one of the leading aeronautical centers of all central Europe."

It was a dream shared by all Berliners.

And after the collapse of the wall in 1989, one of the political priorities was the new infrastructure: reunite Berlin again, celebrate its status as the capital of a reunited country and make it a new global destination.

And many awesome things have been built.

From a giant hole in the ground, near the wall's location, a new central station appeared, connecting the city to the rest of Germany and beyond the country's borders.

With regard to air transport, most politicians agreed that the existing airports of the city, Tempelhof and Tegel, to the west of the city, and Schoenefeld, in what had been communist East , needed an urgent replacement.

They then created a company to build an ambitious new airport.

Changes on the fly

"The supervisory board (of the airport building) was filled with politicians who did not know how to review the project," said Professor Genia Kostka of the Free University of Berlin.

"They were responsible for the key decisions."

When the global financial crisis of 2007-08 erupted, it became harder to call on a large specialist contractor to build and finance the airport, so policymakers decided to use public funds.

Martin Delius, a former Berlin politician who later conducted a thorough investigation into what is wrong, said policymakers had decided "to give 30 to 40 contracts to small businesses that they believe could lower the prices".

"They built a very complex control system that did not work," he says.

The most disturbing of all was the decision to change the size and content of the new airport during its construction.

When he shows me inside the new airport, Michael Dorn, of the company that operates it, FBB, explains that the capacity inside the terminal has doubled after the beginning of the construction work.

Interestingly, one of the problems was that the architect of the airport, Meinhard von Gerkan, did not like to shop.

Joel Dullroy, a journalist with Radio Spaetkauf, who produced a podcast telling the story of the airport, said that Gerkan criticized pbadengers who "drag bottles of whiskey they do not want as beggars" and want to have the fewer stores possible. airport

But when the airport company realized this, it insisted on adding new floors for the stores, since it now receives 50% of its turnover in the retail trade.

More space was needed to install things like sprinklers and smoke extractors, and nobody knew what and exactly where they had been installed.

It was "like repairing a plane in flight," says Professor Genia Kostka.

To lose control

The automakers were also competing to keep up with the revolution of low cost airlines in the airline industry.

According to Dullroy, at the beginning "they had no doors for low-cost flights", only to planes much more expensive than the jets did.

However, politicians who oversee the airport, including the mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, hated the idea of ​​cutting costs.

They insisted that new exit doors had been added to accommodate the giant Airbus A380, whose production had ended before the airport opened.

But as low cost airlines became more and more popular, the airport had to add new sections to accommodate them.

All of these changes, coupled with chaotic supervision, meant that airport builders simply lost control of what was being done, particularly in the highly complex technical infrastructure.

After a first postponement, the airport was to be inaugurated in 2012.

Many people involved in construction have begun to warn of structural problems.

But politicians, obsessed with their dreams of a glamorous party announcing Berlin's new connection to the world, have ignored the bad news.

After the invitations to an opening ceremony were sent with the help of Chancellor Angela Merkel, the local official in charge of building fire safety certification discovered that a system of 39; sophisticated fire alarm, consisting of detectors and automatic doors, was not in place. working

Those who led the construction of the building worked with makeshift systems, which included temporary employees at the doors to sound the alarm with mobile phones.

Mayor Wowereit and his colleagues from local, regional and federal governments had to announce, at a humiliating press conference, that the inauguration could not take place.

Half a million problems

Suddenly, the amazing amount of trouble on the new airport was unearthed.

Hartmut Mehdorn, the new construction manager, has listed all the failures and failures, Delius tells me.

"Smaller ones, like installing incorrect bulbs, big ones because all the cables are fake," he says.

The total was over 550,000, more than half a million problems to be solved.

What we could call a chaotic wiring is the main curse of this project, and it is still present today.

They had to install "several hundred kilometers of new cables," says Dorn, to replace what had been originally placed.

And costs have increased throughout this period, with millions being spent each month to maintain the building.

Some thought, as problems arose, that it would be better to leave the new airport and start another one from scratch.

Delius was one of them. But over time, he changed his mind. "There is a point of no return," he says. "It's public money, if you spend it, you have to get something out of it."

Therefore, the airport without flight has exceeded, in financial terms, the point of no return.

The management company now indicates that the total cost of the project will be 6,000 million euros (US $ 6,830 million), if it opens as planned next year, while forecasts initials were approximately 2,000 million (US $ 2,270 million)).

The final sum will be mainly paid by German taxpayers, spectators of the series with emotions ranging from anger to boredom and black humor.

And some have even turned this black humor into a business opportunity.

Philipp Messinger and Bastian Ignaszewski invented a board game based on the disaster of Berlin Airport. The main objective of the game is to waste as much public money as possible.

I take a map that says some of the escalators at the station were built too short and require very expensive add-on steps.

"All that's happening on these cards," says Messinger, "has really happened."

Dorn, the company managing the airport, says everything that is done is done to ensure that all official permits arrive before the scheduled opening in October 2020.

And he hopes that if it finally opens, the traumatic history of the airport will quickly disappear from the collective memory.

IN ADDITION