24 ms·

Berlin Brandenburg: The airport with half a million faults

206 points by timthorn 7y ago

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
Makes LA Guardia look like a testament to efficiency
rbmktechik 7y ago
This airport legendarily had all the lights on at night despite nobody being there for months because they couldn't figure out how to turn them off. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/berlin-airport-problems-keep-mounting-with-light-switch-trouble-a-886103.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/berlin-airport-...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- paulddraper 7y ago
  It wasn't that someone had installed a light switch and they couldn't find it....they just didn't a have a switch. > "It has to do with the fact that we haven't progressed far enough with our lighting system that we can control it," Horst Amann, airport technical director, said on Wednesday during a rare public appearance.
  - Sharlin 7y ago
    The equivalent of a fancy UI demo rigged up over a minimally functional backend.
    - ido 7y ago
      Isn't it more like functional backend with no UI?
      - Sharlin 7y ago
        I meant to equate the lighting with the UI. To a casual user (a traveller) everything looks fine and probably pretty fancy, but a lot of the more intricate functionality simply isn't there yet.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    They had to have circuit breakers though.
- okr 7y ago
  Hm. How did they switch it on then?
samcday 7y ago
This article was entirely too negative, and neglected to mention some of the best outcomes from this project. Like the fact that BER is the world's most environmentally friendly airport: https://www.der-postillon.com/2019/06/ber-oeko.html https://www.der-postillon.com/2019/06/ber-oeko.html EDIT: </satire>
- Avalaxy 7y ago
  It's good to mention that this is satire. Especially for our non-german speakers.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  Isn't environmental friendliness a ratio of production over impact? If it is not open you have environmental harm without human benefit.
- ptaipale 7y ago
  There's also a satire page "Ist der BER schon fertig?" (Is BER already ready?) that follows up major items in development. http://www.istderberschonfertig.de/ http://www.istderberschonfertig.de/
  - mqus 7y ago
    How is that satire? There are only exact and provable facts there, edited by a major Berlin newspaper, meant to be educating/informing, not funny. But it IS a pretty good summary of the (publicly known) status.
    - type0 7y ago
      Most Berliners do not have the sense of humor where a satire could be applicable.
    - ptaipale 7y ago
      In this case, the presentation of exact and provable facts creates a satisfactory satirical outcome.
pjmlp 7y ago
It has become a running joke around here. Almost every German comedy series has a jab at it.
- odiroot 7y ago
  That's not a joke when you see the payslip every month and notice you give away 42% of your salary to the government.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    That money isn’t all going into mistakes like this. Despite knowing about this airport for years, I moved to Berlin from the UK, which I’m fairly sure [1] raised both my %- and absolute tax rates. Yes, governments make mistakes; but most governments work somewhere between “well” and “adequate” most of the time. [1] it’s harder to work out than I expected.
    - justinmk 7y ago
      > Yes, governments make mistakes; but most governments work somewhere between “well” and “adequate” most of the time. Yes, and they could meet that standard with 20% less tax revenue, too. There's zero reason that any government needs 42% of anyone's income.
      - ben_w 7y ago
        If it was easy to provide the same services with 20% less tax, they would’ve already done it or lost elections to someone who would.
        bubblewrap 7y ago
        I'm not convinced. The public generally is not really aware how the money is being spent. And all parties tend to promise tax reductions that never come. How exactly is the population going to get out of this?
ccjnson 7y ago
What do they use to track all these faults? Is there an issue tracker specific to physical engineering projects?
- buttcoinslol 7y ago
  Procore[0] is popular with general contractors in the US. I work for a national electrical contractor. I'm not sure what architects and engineers use for issue tracking, but they use Procore during the build phase for product submittals, change directives, change orders, RFIs, etc. These are all standard things laid out by the standard AIA contracts. [0] https://www.procore.com/ https://www.procore.com/
thg 7y ago
Stuttgart 21 is another one: https://www.dw.com/en/stuttgart-21-germanys-other-engineering-fiasco-goes-off-the-rails/a-41782621 https://www.dw.com/en/stuttgart-21-germanys-other-engineerin... And there's also Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie: https://www.ft.com/content/d59a5164-d41d-11e6-9341-7393bb2e1b51 https://www.ft.com/content/d59a5164-d41d-11e6-9341-7393bb2e1... Basically boils down to: If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time. Most recent example was the bridge deconstruction in our small town. It was supposed to cost 80k Euros to completely deconstruct it. Actual cost was 150k and we have the pillars still standing around. It's just business as usual here in Germany.
- elcomet 7y ago
  I think it's just about the same everywhere. In France you hear the same stories. I think we are just bad at estimating costs and time.
  - empath75 7y ago
    Also the us. The subway extension to Dulles airport is years over due and well over budget. I don’t think it’s a problem with government. If you want these sorts of public good projects built, you need government to do it. Government doesn’t have the same incentives that private business does, and there are positives and negatives with that. A profit oriented organization would never have taken on projects of this scale.
    - roadbeats 7y ago
      Istanbul Airport was built in 3 years by private companies, it was opened this year and considered as biggest after the new Chinese airport being built.
      - phreeza 7y ago
        I wonder if it has something to do with construction company execs having more skin in the game in more authoritarian regimes.
progx 7y ago
This reflects the state of our government.
nayuki 7y ago
Half as Interesting made a fun short video 2 months ago about this airport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll58ZrIupKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll58ZrIupKA
Gyonka 7y ago
Here's a terrific video that explains some of the history and current issues surrounding Brandenburg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll58ZrIupKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll58ZrIupKA
cmurf 7y ago
Hubris, incompetency, inexperience at the very top. And what was needed was the opposite, which sounds obvious, but then the former problems directly inhibited recognizing anything obvious.
allengeorge 7y ago
The key point: major changes were made: 1. Very late in the design process 2. After construction had started (!) I mean, politicians or not, the moment you start making major changes during buildout you’re going to have problems, regardless of what you’re building.
- consp 7y ago
  You describe with this every big government software project as well.
  - mrich 7y ago
    You can remove government from that sentence.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  > One simple problem, bizarrely enough, was the airport architect, Meinhard von Gerkan's dislike of shopping. > Joel Dullroy, a Berlin-based journalist with Radio Spaetkauf, who produced a podcast telling this airport's story, says Mr Gerkan wrote disdainfully about passengers "dragging around unwanted bottles of whisky like a beggar" and wanted to have as few airport shops as possible. > But when the airport company realised this - very late in the day - it insisted on adding whole new floors of shopping into the design, as the company now makes up to 50% of its revenue from retail. Yeah, that's gonna do it.
- tomglynch 7y ago
  The should have just followed AGILE methodology.
jacek 7y ago
To those interested in the topic I highly recommend the podcast, that is mentioned in the article - "How to fuck up an airport" [1]. It is very entertaining, while exploring the topic in depth. [1] http://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/ http://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/
continuations 7y ago
> The management company now says the overall cost of the project will be 6bn euros (£5.3bn) - if it opens as planned next year 6 billion euros is $6.83B. That actually sounds like a bargain for a brand new airport with 2 runways. For comparison, Heathrow's 3rd runway is estimated to cost £18.6B.[1] That's $23.6B for just 1 runway. LAX renovation has a projected cost of $14B [2]. That's $14B just to "improve the design, safety and efficiency of the airport." No new runway will be built. Hong Kong Airport 3rd runway is expected to cost HK$141.5B [3]. That's $18B for 1 runway. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport [2] https://www.gobankingrates.com/making-money/business/lax-airport-renovation-cost/ https://www.gobankingrates.com/making-money/business/lax-air... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_International_Airport_Master_Plan_2030 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_International_Airpor...
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  Mind that it isn't a "complete" airport. It's on the area of Berlin-Schönefeld airport. Thus less need to acquire new land. Which I expect to be a notable part for a new runway in London's vicinity (of course a new runway also requires new fire fighting station and new tower etc. to guarantee service, such a project is a bit more than just the runway)
- jlg23 7y ago
  How much was land acquisition and noise proofing of residential buildings for those? The new airport in Berlin is not in a particularly densely populated area...
- peteretep 7y ago
  Your Heathrow numbers are off. Latest cost is £14b, and the price includes re-routing one of the UK’s busiest roads into a tunnel, building a new terminal, and purchasing 7,000 of the UK’s most expensive homes, while not disrupting air traffic at an airport which handles take offs and landings every 45 seconds from two runways. Given that, “for just 1 runway” feels unfair
  - 7y ago
davnicwil 7y ago
If I may take an opinion on this having lived in Berlin for 2 years, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this is that this new airport isn't just like a better, fancier one that'll replace an already adequate airport(s) - Berlin's existing airports (Tegel the 'main' one and Schonefeld the secondary) are, to put it mildly, an embarrassment for the captial city of Europe's biggest economy. They are quite simply awful, way over capacity, bad facilities, and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially). I honestly would rate both of them poorly if they were regional airports. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find a regional airport anywhere in Europe as bad as these. It makes flying in and (especially) out of Berlin pretty inconvenient, particularly internationally where you need to do a short hop to an actual European international hub airport to even get a direct flight to most places (only direct long haul flight I ever got out of Tegel was to Abu Dhabi - to US, Latin America, etc, all needed connections first). To be fair Berlin has a unique culture as a capital and it's not your typical 'capital city' experience, but this is just basic infrastructure and really, really should be there. You pay a lot of tax, after all.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  is this some kind of second system effect ?
- martinald 7y ago
  Agreed entirely. I think there are about 4 electrical outlets for customers in the entirety of SXF. Also, the train station is nowhere near the airport, especially for the RB9 express train which is the furthest platform. It's really the worst airport I've been to and as you say makes the whole situation a lot worse.
  - pizza234 7y ago
    > Also, the train station is nowhere near the airport, especially for the RB9 express train which is the furthest platform. It's less than 500m to the terminal A. If one's really bothered by this (d'oh), they can take the U7+bus, which ends in front of terminal A (in addition to being much more frequent).
- 7y ago
lazyjones 7y ago
One has to wonder why Turkey fared much better (though not perfectly) with their huge airport project: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-istanbul-airport-largest-erdogan-terminal-runway-ataturk-international-a8606666.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-istan...
- Tomte 7y ago
  I doubt a Turkish supervision agency would have stopped the Turkish airport even once for any reason, with Erdogan's clear will to open it on time. In Germany they did many times, for all kinds of reasons (mostly fire response).
- user5994461 7y ago
  The article says this airport is $11B. It's more than twice the costs of the "failed" German airport.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  There is a comment in this thread by rolleiflex on the number of worker deaths and shambolic state of the airport 2 weeks ago. Press freedoms in Turkey might be the actual difference.
rkachowski 7y ago
I still don't understand how building an airport can be so difficult, and how we've apparently gotten worse at it over time. There's a weird mix of ego and incompetence at work in the BER project (e.g. smoke vents installed in the floor for artistic reasons, despite the face that smoke rises). Yet at its core, an MVP of an airport would be a runway with a building next to it + fuel and security services. It baffles the mind that this can be such a shitstorm. I can only perceive this to be bikeshedding at a national scale.
- timthorn 7y ago
  No need for a building. You can have an MVP with a tent for a terminal, as Heath Row proved: https://www.backheathrow.org/70_years_of_heathrow https://www.backheathrow.org/70_years_of_heathrow
- mrich 7y ago
  The cynical take: These projects are just run and delayed over and over to hand out money and contracts to the friends of politicians.
willyt 7y ago
I’ve worked on airport design. €5bn is not that much and 10 years is not a particularly long build time. Heathrow’s T5 building was about £4bn and the design work started in the 1980’s and it had loads of teething problems also. What’s the big deal? It sounds like they were just unrealistic about how long it would take and how much it would cost.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  > What’s the big deal? It sounds like they were just unrealistic about how long it would take and how much it would cost. ohthehugemanate posted this link and suggested reading the bit on construction delays. If this sort of stuff is considered normal in the industry, that is a big problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport
- aeyes 7y ago
  The big deal is that it is done since 5+ years and they are postponing the opening because of a million minor issues without having any kind of schedule for fixing them. And whenever they are just about ready they find a million new issues. The big deal is that there is a lot of technology in there which now has to be replaced because it is reaching its end of life without ever being used. The big deal is that this is a waste of taxpayer money. If this was privately financed I wouldn't care either but it isn't. At this point whoever is working there is just milking us.
NewsAware 7y ago
One aspect I didn't see mentioned here so far which explains these mechanics beyond simple "the government is just incompetent" rethoric: Unlike some (but not all) private institutions, regional and national government officials are incentivized to downplay the budget/runtime of major infrastructure projects as 1) the person is often not going to be around and accountable anymore once the true extend comes to light 2) telling the truth/adding proper buffers would make the project not being accepted by voters. So downplaying is the only way to get such projects through at all in many cases
Rockslide 7y ago
I know it's en vogue to mock Germany / Berlin for BER, and it's certainly deserved to a certain extent. However, BER also shows another thing to me: that regulations are taken damn seriously in Germany. I can think of some countries on the planet were such an infrastructure project would have long been in operation regardless of not meeting regulations. The manner in which this all unfolded is however a completely different story...
- helloguillecl 7y ago
  This. In most of the countries, including my own, the airport would have open despite the imperfections. The delay per-se is a disaster, but it shows also how much Germany sticks to their regulations and legality in general.
- bubblewrap 7y ago
  Some people are earning good (government) money from the ruin of the airport just sitting there, every day. Not sure it is all just about regulations.
ohthehugemanate 7y ago
This article whitewashes the hell out of this debacle under the aegis of "politicians messed it up." It is way worse than that. Go read the Wikipedia article; it's very entertaining. BBC fails to mention details like: * The fire response system wasn't just broken; it was never built. Siemens (a small/medium sized contractor according to the article) is "still waiting for paperwork" to deliver the software for the smoke suction system, based on hardware which was never even designed. * The ventilation system turned out to be impossible. The architect didn't want ventilation ducts on top of the design for aesthetic reasons, so air was to be ducted and blown down, and out to vents on the airfield. Pushing warm air downwards many meters is generally not a trivial ask. * turns out the architect of the fire suppression system wasn't an architect, but only a draftsman. * The sand lime brick used in the foundations apparently necessesitatss replacing big chunks of foundation, cabling, and concrete. * The windows wouldn't open when the weather was above 30 degrees Celsius (about 80 fahrenheit). It's 36 in Berlin today. * 80% (!) of the doors just didn't work as of 2017. * For the opening in 2012, there were no ticket counters and the escalators did not work. * Three rounds of bribery and corruption charges in the project leadership * 5 different project chairpeople and presidents * By 2017, there were still major problems with smoke control, sprinklers, fire detection, sirens, emergency bulbs, and similar critical systems. * Big parts of the cable ducting was not waterproof, and now about 700km of cabling needs to be replaced. * 600 fire protection walls have to be replaced because they were made out of the wrong kind of concrete. * They had to halt construction at one point because the main roof was going to collapse due to structural issues. * The railway station serving the airport (built by Deutsche Bahn), and the tunnel to the airport (built by the airport construction company) were incompatible and had to be adjusted. * When they finally simulated a fire situation (2017) they discovered they needed way more water than was planned for the sprinkler systems... Which therefore needed to be replaced. The official scheduled opening date remains October 2020, but several official letters have called that info question. Certainly no one in Berlin expects it to open then. It has been delayed 10 times so far. This is not just bureaucratic bungling. This is incompetence, corruption, mismanagement, AND bungling. Anyone on HN who has a contracting background can tell you: no responsible or capable project management would touch this steaming dumpster fire at this point. It has more warning flags than cabling problems, and that's saying something. Really, read the Wikipedia section on "construction delays". It's very entertaining: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport
scarejunba 7y ago
Interesting. Perhaps real world construction and software have many similarities after all. They break down in similar circumstances.
welder 7y ago
The best part comes at the end: > And some have even turned this black humour into a business opportunity. Philipp Messinger and Bastian Ignaszewski have invented a board game based on the Berlin airport disaster. The main object of the game is to waste as much public money as possible. > I pick up a card saying some of the escalators from the train station were built too short, needing very expensive additions. "Everything on these cards," Mr Messinger says, "has really happened."
FabHK 7y ago
The architect, Meinhard von Gerkan, wrote a book about it, Black Box BER, back in 2013, after they were fired in 2012. It's a bit self-serving, unsurprisingly, but highlights some of the issues arising when you change plans mid-construction. For example, an airport has very carefully designed zones: land-side and air-side (after security), Schengen and non-Schengen (after immigration), staff and non-staff, etc., that must be separated. It also has carefully considered passenger flow, escape routes, fire sprinklers and smoke vents, etc. Then, after all is agreed and construction had started, the airport company requested much more space for retail. That's obviously going to lead to problems. One thing I must say, though: I am glad that the officials responsible for fire safety are not afraid to deny certification. There was a fire at DUS (Düsseldorf Airport) in 1996 in which 17 people died. So, good job in standing up to the immense pressure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorf_Airport#Düsseldorf_Airport_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorf_Airport#Düsseldorf_...
- paulddraper 7y ago
  The BBC article says that's a major problem, but actually puts a large part of the blame on Gerkan himself. (IDK whether justified on not.) > One simple problem, bizarrely enough, was the airport architect, Meinhard von Gerkan's, dislike of shopping. > Joel Dullroy, a Berlin-based journalist with Radio Spaetkauf, who produced a podcast telling this airport's story, says Mr Gerkan wrote disdainfully about passengers "dragging around unwanted bottles of whisky like a beggar" and wanted to have as few airport shops as possible. > But when the airport company realised this - very late in the day - it insisted on adding whole new floors of shopping into the design, as the company now makes up to 50% of its revenue from retail.
  - anon946 7y ago
    Wouldn't the design have been carefully reviewed by the airport company before approval?
    - gumby 7y ago
      If executed properly, sure, but nobody was realy in charge and the politicians (not chosen for their qualifications for the task) didn't know how to this (or to do at all).
jliptzin 7y ago
And yet the stock is back to where it was before the breach anyway. His mistake was not realizing that there are no consequences for not safeguarding customer data properly.
timkam 7y ago
Fun fact: when I arrive in Berlin, the plane often lands on the new airport's airfield and then rolls on to the old Schönefeld airport, passing the new, dysfunctional BER main building; just to remind us visitors of the city government's incompetence.
danielam 7y ago
Then there’s the planned transportation hub[0][1] near Warsaw which will include a high capacity airport built in stages. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Central_Polish_Airport https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Central_Polish_Airport [1] https://centreforaviation.com/data/profiles/newairports/new-central-polish-airport-lodz https://centreforaviation.com/data/profiles/newairports/new-...

206 points by timthorn 7y ago

Makes LA Guardia look like a testament to efficiency

This airport legendarily had all the lights on at night despite nobody being there for months because they couldn't figure out how to turn them off. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/berlin-airport-problems-keep-mounting-with-light-switch-trouble-a-886103.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/berlin-airport-...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
paulddraper 7y ago
It wasn't that someone had installed a light switch and they couldn't find it....they just didn't a have a switch. > "It has to do with the fact that we haven't progressed far enough with our lighting system that we can control it," Horst Amann, airport technical director, said on Wednesday during a rare public appearance.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  The equivalent of a fancy UI demo rigged up over a minimally functional backend.
  - ido 7y ago
    Isn't it more like functional backend with no UI?
    - Sharlin 7y ago
      I meant to equate the lighting with the UI. To a casual user (a traveller) everything looks fine and probably pretty fancy, but a lot of the more intricate functionality simply isn't there yet.
- anoncake 7y ago
  They had to have circuit breakers though.
okr 7y ago
Hm. How did they switch it on then?

samcday 7y ago

This article was entirely too negative, and neglected to mention some of the best outcomes from this project. Like the fact that BER is the world's most environmentally friendly airport: https://www.der-postillon.com/2019/06/ber-oeko.html https://www.der-postillon.com/2019/06/ber-oeko.html EDIT: </satire>

Avalaxy 7y ago
It's good to mention that this is satire. Especially for our non-german speakers.
PaulHoule 7y ago
Isn't environmental friendliness a ratio of production over impact? If it is not open you have environmental harm without human benefit.
ptaipale 7y ago
There's also a satire page "Ist der BER schon fertig?" (Is BER already ready?) that follows up major items in development. http://www.istderberschonfertig.de/ http://www.istderberschonfertig.de/
- mqus 7y ago
  How is that satire? There are only exact and provable facts there, edited by a major Berlin newspaper, meant to be educating/informing, not funny. But it IS a pretty good summary of the (publicly known) status.
  - type0 7y ago
    Most Berliners do not have the sense of humor where a satire could be applicable.
  - ptaipale 7y ago
    In this case, the presentation of exact and provable facts creates a satisfactory satirical outcome.

pjmlp 7y ago

It has become a running joke around here. Almost every German comedy series has a jab at it.

odiroot 7y ago
That's not a joke when you see the payslip every month and notice you give away 42% of your salary to the government.
- ben_w 7y ago
  That money isn’t all going into mistakes like this. Despite knowing about this airport for years, I moved to Berlin from the UK, which I’m fairly sure [1] raised both my %- and absolute tax rates. Yes, governments make mistakes; but most governments work somewhere between “well” and “adequate” most of the time. [1] it’s harder to work out than I expected.
  - justinmk 7y ago
    > Yes, governments make mistakes; but most governments work somewhere between “well” and “adequate” most of the time. Yes, and they could meet that standard with 20% less tax revenue, too. There's zero reason that any government needs 42% of anyone's income.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      If it was easy to provide the same services with 20% less tax, they would’ve already done it or lost elections to someone who would.
      - bubblewrap 7y ago
        I'm not convinced. The public generally is not really aware how the money is being spent. And all parties tend to promise tax reductions that never come. How exactly is the population going to get out of this?

ccjnson 7y ago

What do they use to track all these faults? Is there an issue tracker specific to physical engineering projects?

buttcoinslol 7y ago
Procore[0] is popular with general contractors in the US. I work for a national electrical contractor. I'm not sure what architects and engineers use for issue tracking, but they use Procore during the build phase for product submittals, change directives, change orders, RFIs, etc. These are all standard things laid out by the standard AIA contracts. [0] https://www.procore.com/ https://www.procore.com/

thg 7y ago

Stuttgart 21 is another one: https://www.dw.com/en/stuttgart-21-germanys-other-engineering-fiasco-goes-off-the-rails/a-41782621 https://www.dw.com/en/stuttgart-21-germanys-other-engineerin... And there's also Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie: https://www.ft.com/content/d59a5164-d41d-11e6-9341-7393bb2e1b51 https://www.ft.com/content/d59a5164-d41d-11e6-9341-7393bb2e1... Basically boils down to: If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time. Most recent example was the bridge deconstruction in our small town. It was supposed to cost 80k Euros to completely deconstruct it. Actual cost was 150k and we have the pillars still standing around. It's just business as usual here in Germany.

elcomet 7y ago
I think it's just about the same everywhere. In France you hear the same stories. I think we are just bad at estimating costs and time.
- empath75 7y ago
  Also the us. The subway extension to Dulles airport is years over due and well over budget. I don’t think it’s a problem with government. If you want these sorts of public good projects built, you need government to do it. Government doesn’t have the same incentives that private business does, and there are positives and negatives with that. A profit oriented organization would never have taken on projects of this scale.
  - roadbeats 7y ago
    Istanbul Airport was built in 3 years by private companies, it was opened this year and considered as biggest after the new Chinese airport being built.
    - phreeza 7y ago
      I wonder if it has something to do with construction company execs having more skin in the game in more authoritarian regimes.

progx 7y ago

This reflects the state of our government.

nayuki 7y ago

Half as Interesting made a fun short video 2 months ago about this airport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll58ZrIupKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll58ZrIupKA

Gyonka 7y ago

Here's a terrific video that explains some of the history and current issues surrounding Brandenburg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll58ZrIupKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll58ZrIupKA

cmurf 7y ago

Hubris, incompetency, inexperience at the very top. And what was needed was the opposite, which sounds obvious, but then the former problems directly inhibited recognizing anything obvious.

allengeorge 7y ago

The key point: major changes were made: 1. Very late in the design process 2. After construction had started (!) I mean, politicians or not, the moment you start making major changes during buildout you’re going to have problems, regardless of what you’re building.

consp 7y ago
You describe with this every big government software project as well.
- mrich 7y ago
  You can remove government from that sentence.
paulddraper 7y ago
> One simple problem, bizarrely enough, was the airport architect, Meinhard von Gerkan's dislike of shopping. > Joel Dullroy, a Berlin-based journalist with Radio Spaetkauf, who produced a podcast telling this airport's story, says Mr Gerkan wrote disdainfully about passengers "dragging around unwanted bottles of whisky like a beggar" and wanted to have as few airport shops as possible. > But when the airport company realised this - very late in the day - it insisted on adding whole new floors of shopping into the design, as the company now makes up to 50% of its revenue from retail. Yeah, that's gonna do it.
tomglynch 7y ago
The should have just followed AGILE methodology.

jacek 7y ago

To those interested in the topic I highly recommend the podcast, that is mentioned in the article - "How to fuck up an airport" [1]. It is very entertaining, while exploring the topic in depth. [1] http://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/ http://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/

continuations 7y ago

> The management company now says the overall cost of the project will be 6bn euros (£5.3bn) - if it opens as planned next year 6 billion euros is $6.83B. That actually sounds like a bargain for a brand new airport with 2 runways. For comparison, Heathrow's 3rd runway is estimated to cost £18.6B.[1] That's $23.6B for just 1 runway. LAX renovation has a projected cost of $14B [2]. That's $14B just to "improve the design, safety and efficiency of the airport." No new runway will be built. Hong Kong Airport 3rd runway is expected to cost HK$141.5B [3]. That's $18B for 1 runway. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport [2] https://www.gobankingrates.com/making-money/business/lax-airport-renovation-cost/ https://www.gobankingrates.com/making-money/business/lax-air... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_International_Airport_Master_Plan_2030 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_International_Airpor...

johannes1234321 7y ago
Mind that it isn't a "complete" airport. It's on the area of Berlin-Schönefeld airport. Thus less need to acquire new land. Which I expect to be a notable part for a new runway in London's vicinity (of course a new runway also requires new fire fighting station and new tower etc. to guarantee service, such a project is a bit more than just the runway)
jlg23 7y ago
How much was land acquisition and noise proofing of residential buildings for those? The new airport in Berlin is not in a particularly densely populated area...
peteretep 7y ago
Your Heathrow numbers are off. Latest cost is £14b, and the price includes re-routing one of the UK’s busiest roads into a tunnel, building a new terminal, and purchasing 7,000 of the UK’s most expensive homes, while not disrupting air traffic at an airport which handles take offs and landings every 45 seconds from two runways. Given that, “for just 1 runway” feels unfair
- 7y ago

davnicwil 7y ago

If I may take an opinion on this having lived in Berlin for 2 years, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this is that this new airport isn't just like a better, fancier one that'll replace an already adequate airport(s) - Berlin's existing airports (Tegel the 'main' one and Schonefeld the secondary) are, to put it mildly, an embarrassment for the captial city of Europe's biggest economy. They are quite simply awful, way over capacity, bad facilities, and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially). I honestly would rate both of them poorly if they were regional airports. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find a regional airport anywhere in Europe as bad as these. It makes flying in and (especially) out of Berlin pretty inconvenient, particularly internationally where you need to do a short hop to an actual European international hub airport to even get a direct flight to most places (only direct long haul flight I ever got out of Tegel was to Abu Dhabi - to US, Latin America, etc, all needed connections first). To be fair Berlin has a unique culture as a capital and it's not your typical 'capital city' experience, but this is just basic infrastructure and really, really should be there. You pay a lot of tax, after all.

agumonkey 7y ago
is this some kind of second system effect ?
martinald 7y ago
Agreed entirely. I think there are about 4 electrical outlets for customers in the entirety of SXF. Also, the train station is nowhere near the airport, especially for the RB9 express train which is the furthest platform. It's really the worst airport I've been to and as you say makes the whole situation a lot worse.
- pizza234 7y ago
  > Also, the train station is nowhere near the airport, especially for the RB9 express train which is the furthest platform. It's less than 500m to the terminal A. If one's really bothered by this (d'oh), they can take the U7+bus, which ends in front of terminal A (in addition to being much more frequent).
7y ago

lazyjones 7y ago

One has to wonder why Turkey fared much better (though not perfectly) with their huge airport project: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-istanbul-airport-largest-erdogan-terminal-runway-ataturk-international-a8606666.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-istan...

Tomte 7y ago
I doubt a Turkish supervision agency would have stopped the Turkish airport even once for any reason, with Erdogan's clear will to open it on time. In Germany they did many times, for all kinds of reasons (mostly fire response).
user5994461 7y ago
The article says this airport is $11B. It's more than twice the costs of the "failed" German airport.
lostlogin 7y ago
There is a comment in this thread by rolleiflex on the number of worker deaths and shambolic state of the airport 2 weeks ago. Press freedoms in Turkey might be the actual difference.

rkachowski 7y ago

I still don't understand how building an airport can be so difficult, and how we've apparently gotten worse at it over time. There's a weird mix of ego and incompetence at work in the BER project (e.g. smoke vents installed in the floor for artistic reasons, despite the face that smoke rises). Yet at its core, an MVP of an airport would be a runway with a building next to it + fuel and security services. It baffles the mind that this can be such a shitstorm. I can only perceive this to be bikeshedding at a national scale.

timthorn 7y ago
No need for a building. You can have an MVP with a tent for a terminal, as Heath Row proved: https://www.backheathrow.org/70_years_of_heathrow https://www.backheathrow.org/70_years_of_heathrow
mrich 7y ago
The cynical take: These projects are just run and delayed over and over to hand out money and contracts to the friends of politicians.

willyt 7y ago

I’ve worked on airport design. €5bn is not that much and 10 years is not a particularly long build time. Heathrow’s T5 building was about £4bn and the design work started in the 1980’s and it had loads of teething problems also. What’s the big deal? It sounds like they were just unrealistic about how long it would take and how much it would cost.

lostlogin 7y ago
> What’s the big deal? It sounds like they were just unrealistic about how long it would take and how much it would cost. ohthehugemanate posted this link and suggested reading the bit on construction delays. If this sort of stuff is considered normal in the industry, that is a big problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport
aeyes 7y ago
The big deal is that it is done since 5+ years and they are postponing the opening because of a million minor issues without having any kind of schedule for fixing them. And whenever they are just about ready they find a million new issues. The big deal is that there is a lot of technology in there which now has to be replaced because it is reaching its end of life without ever being used. The big deal is that this is a waste of taxpayer money. If this was privately financed I wouldn't care either but it isn't. At this point whoever is working there is just milking us.

NewsAware 7y ago

One aspect I didn't see mentioned here so far which explains these mechanics beyond simple "the government is just incompetent" rethoric: Unlike some (but not all) private institutions, regional and national government officials are incentivized to downplay the budget/runtime of major infrastructure projects as 1) the person is often not going to be around and accountable anymore once the true extend comes to light 2) telling the truth/adding proper buffers would make the project not being accepted by voters. So downplaying is the only way to get such projects through at all in many cases

Rockslide 7y ago

I know it's en vogue to mock Germany / Berlin for BER, and it's certainly deserved to a certain extent. However, BER also shows another thing to me: that regulations are taken damn seriously in Germany. I can think of some countries on the planet were such an infrastructure project would have long been in operation regardless of not meeting regulations. The manner in which this all unfolded is however a completely different story...

helloguillecl 7y ago
This. In most of the countries, including my own, the airport would have open despite the imperfections. The delay per-se is a disaster, but it shows also how much Germany sticks to their regulations and legality in general.
bubblewrap 7y ago
Some people are earning good (government) money from the ruin of the airport just sitting there, every day. Not sure it is all just about regulations.

ohthehugemanate 7y ago

This article whitewashes the hell out of this debacle under the aegis of "politicians messed it up." It is way worse than that. Go read the Wikipedia article; it's very entertaining. BBC fails to mention details like: * The fire response system wasn't just broken; it was never built. Siemens (a small/medium sized contractor according to the article) is "still waiting for paperwork" to deliver the software for the smoke suction system, based on hardware which was never even designed. * The ventilation system turned out to be impossible. The architect didn't want ventilation ducts on top of the design for aesthetic reasons, so air was to be ducted and blown down, and out to vents on the airfield. Pushing warm air downwards many meters is generally not a trivial ask. * turns out the architect of the fire suppression system wasn't an architect, but only a draftsman. * The sand lime brick used in the foundations apparently necessesitatss replacing big chunks of foundation, cabling, and concrete. * The windows wouldn't open when the weather was above 30 degrees Celsius (about 80 fahrenheit). It's 36 in Berlin today. * 80% (!) of the doors just didn't work as of 2017. * For the opening in 2012, there were no ticket counters and the escalators did not work. * Three rounds of bribery and corruption charges in the project leadership * 5 different project chairpeople and presidents * By 2017, there were still major problems with smoke control, sprinklers, fire detection, sirens, emergency bulbs, and similar critical systems. * Big parts of the cable ducting was not waterproof, and now about 700km of cabling needs to be replaced. * 600 fire protection walls have to be replaced because they were made out of the wrong kind of concrete. * They had to halt construction at one point because the main roof was going to collapse due to structural issues. * The railway station serving the airport (built by Deutsche Bahn), and the tunnel to the airport (built by the airport construction company) were incompatible and had to be adjusted. * When they finally simulated a fire situation (2017) they discovered they needed way more water than was planned for the sprinkler systems... Which therefore needed to be replaced. The official scheduled opening date remains October 2020, but several official letters have called that info question. Certainly no one in Berlin expects it to open then. It has been delayed 10 times so far. This is not just bureaucratic bungling. This is incompetence, corruption, mismanagement, AND bungling. Anyone on HN who has a contracting background can tell you: no responsible or capable project management would touch this steaming dumpster fire at this point. It has more warning flags than cabling problems, and that's saying something. Really, read the Wikipedia section on "construction delays". It's very entertaining: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport

scarejunba 7y ago

Interesting. Perhaps real world construction and software have many similarities after all. They break down in similar circumstances.

welder 7y ago

The best part comes at the end: > And some have even turned this black humour into a business opportunity. Philipp Messinger and Bastian Ignaszewski have invented a board game based on the Berlin airport disaster. The main object of the game is to waste as much public money as possible. > I pick up a card saying some of the escalators from the train station were built too short, needing very expensive additions. "Everything on these cards," Mr Messinger says, "has really happened."

FabHK 7y ago

The architect, Meinhard von Gerkan, wrote a book about it, Black Box BER, back in 2013, after they were fired in 2012. It's a bit self-serving, unsurprisingly, but highlights some of the issues arising when you change plans mid-construction. For example, an airport has very carefully designed zones: land-side and air-side (after security), Schengen and non-Schengen (after immigration), staff and non-staff, etc., that must be separated. It also has carefully considered passenger flow, escape routes, fire sprinklers and smoke vents, etc. Then, after all is agreed and construction had started, the airport company requested much more space for retail. That's obviously going to lead to problems. One thing I must say, though: I am glad that the officials responsible for fire safety are not afraid to deny certification. There was a fire at DUS (Düsseldorf Airport) in 1996 in which 17 people died. So, good job in standing up to the immense pressure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorf_Airport#Düsseldorf_Airport_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorf_Airport#Düsseldorf_...

paulddraper 7y ago
The BBC article says that's a major problem, but actually puts a large part of the blame on Gerkan himself. (IDK whether justified on not.) > One simple problem, bizarrely enough, was the airport architect, Meinhard von Gerkan's, dislike of shopping. > Joel Dullroy, a Berlin-based journalist with Radio Spaetkauf, who produced a podcast telling this airport's story, says Mr Gerkan wrote disdainfully about passengers "dragging around unwanted bottles of whisky like a beggar" and wanted to have as few airport shops as possible. > But when the airport company realised this - very late in the day - it insisted on adding whole new floors of shopping into the design, as the company now makes up to 50% of its revenue from retail.
- anon946 7y ago
  Wouldn't the design have been carefully reviewed by the airport company before approval?
  - gumby 7y ago
    If executed properly, sure, but nobody was realy in charge and the politicians (not chosen for their qualifications for the task) didn't know how to this (or to do at all).

jliptzin 7y ago

And yet the stock is back to where it was before the breach anyway. His mistake was not realizing that there are no consequences for not safeguarding customer data properly.

timkam 7y ago

Fun fact: when I arrive in Berlin, the plane often lands on the new airport's airfield and then rolls on to the old Schönefeld airport, passing the new, dysfunctional BER main building; just to remind us visitors of the city government's incompetence.

danielam 7y ago

Then there’s the planned transportation hub[0][1] near Warsaw which will include a high capacity airport built in stages. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Central_Polish_Airport https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Central_Polish_Airport [1] https://centreforaviation.com/data/profiles/newairports/new-central-polish-airport-lodz https://centreforaviation.com/data/profiles/newairports/new-...