BERLIN – Arriving in Germany via a connecting flight from Doha’s ultramodern airport makes one wonder why the airport in this economic superpower of a country is disappointingly unimpressive. In fairness to the Germans, they tried to build a new modern airport for their capital city. They just can’t seem to inaugurate it.
It is difficult to believe that a country known for precision engineering and punctuality can suffer so many technical problems that make a new airport in Berlin simply an elusive dream. I googled to understand why.
According to the Telegraph, an opening ceremony – due to be attended by Angela Merkel and 10,000 guests – had to be cancelled with just a few days notice because of a fault with the new airport’s fire alarms and smoke extractors.
“However, that turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg, because since then the airport has been waylaid by a catalogue of major technical faults.”
They broke ground for the new airport in 2006 and they are still talking of inaugurating it in 2020.
Early last year, planners said the current estimated costs would reach €7.3 billion, way over the original €2 billion budget. That new estimate could still rise because every month the airport sits unopened, it racks up millions of euros in maintenance and upkeep costs.
BBC reports: “The first major sign something was wrong came in summer 2010, when the corporation running construction, the state- and federally-controlled Flughafen Berlin-Brandenburg, pushed the opening from October 2011 to June 2012.
In 2012, inspectors found significant problems with the fire safety system and pushed the opening back again to 2013.
“It wasn’t just the smoke system: a series of other major problems subsequently emerged. More than 90 meters of cable were incorrectly installed; 4,000 doors were wrongly numbered; escalators were too short.
“There was such a shortage of check-in desks the planners proposed some airlines check their passengers in at tents in front of the terminal – a move that airlines naturally opposed.”
Worse, every month it remains unopened they are running up costs of between €9 million and €10 million, Engelbert Lütke Daldrup, head of the committee running the construction, said in response to a parliamentary query.
The cost of cleaning, maintenance, repairs and energy for terminals no passengers have ever flown through is so high, a BBC report observed.
“For example, all 750 of the monitors showing flight information had to be replaced – at a cost of €500,000 – because they had burned out after years. For months in 2013, a computer glitch meant planners couldn’t turn off the lights in the terminal (this has since been fixed). And empty trains run into the airport’s station every weekday to keep it properly ventilated.”
An opinion writer in Deutsche Welle urged government to tear down the unopened airport and start over. Gutting the terminal and starting over may be the right thing to do, but why aren’t they doing that? BBC’s report guesses why:
“It’s a classic example of the so-called sunk cost fallacy: people (or in this case, organizations) are often hesitant to cut their losses when they’ve already invested time or resources into something, even if it might make logical sense to do so. This is a phenomenon not just in high-profile, high-cost projects such as this one, but a way of thinking that can often come up in everyday working life as well.”
And yes, it is the fault of politicians. Again, the BBC reports:
“Initially, rather than appointing a general contractor to run the project, the corporation decided to manage it themselves despite not having experience with an undertaking of that scale… the supervisory council staffed with politicians of course … couldn’t do the job.”
“The real problems, according to a DW editorial, seem to be a twin pack of moral hazard and a simple lack of accountability.
“Politicians with limited project management experience were running the supervisory board and could freely make decisions with the knowledge that by the time any complications came to light they – the decision-makers – would be gone.
“Besides this, there was the near-guarantee that the government would be forced to step in to cover extra costs on such an important infrastructure project, giving extra breathing room and perhaps taking away some of the fiscal pressure.”
Wow! I can’t believe the politicians didn’t have to account for their failure. That gives Germany much in common with Third World countries like ours where politicians get away with incompetence.
Assuming everything finally goes well and Berlin’s Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport (BER) finally opens, its capacity will be too small to handle Berlin’s needs.
Tegel and Schönefeld, the two other airports, are supposed to be closed when BER opened. DW reports that Berlin’s two airports handled 33.3 million passengers last year. They now have a new 17-year, three-phase master plan to enlarge the still unfinished airport to handle 55 million passengers.
As of now, BBC reports that there are still a “variety of defects” with the power cable system, as well as power and lighting for the security system…”
Still the man in charge of the project insists that “all the experts tell me there are no shortcomings at BER Airport we can’t fix.”
According to the BBC, the airport “isn’t the only major infrastructure project that’s gone way over deadline and budget in recent years. Stuttgart’s new main train station was announced in 1995, but won’t be finished until at least 2021.
Come to think of it, our own Terminal 3 was a ghost airport for a decade and a German company, Fraport, was involved. Luckily, construction was done by the Japanese so no technical problems similar to Berlin’s airport.
Jobst Fiedler, a professor emeritus at Berlin’s Hertie School of Governance and the author of a 2015 case study on the airport, told BBC “It is not easy in one project to combine so many errors. It is a major blunder, this project.”
I don’t know… I am a satisfied owner of an over 10 year old BMW and I am in awe of German engineering. But as someone said, trust the Germans to produce the best on four wheels. Just don’t trust them to build four walls.
Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco