Failure haunts Berlin ghost airport

Once touted as a shining example of Germany's engineering prowess, the capital's new international aviation hub has become an acute embarrassment as costly delays and design foul ups leave it still not open.

A fence protects the site of the terminal building under construction at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport Willy Brandt in March of 2012. Johannes Eisele / AFP

A year ago, I took part in a press tour of Berlin's new international airport. At the time, it was due to open just weeks later, on June 3.

The spokesman insisted with utter conviction everything would be ready on time. He emphasised how thoroughly the opening had been prepared, with 10,000 volunteers equipped with 15,000 suitcases having tested the baggage-handling system over and over again.

"We have learned from the experiences of others such as Heathrow Terminal 5," the spokesman said, referring to the brief chaos that followed the opening of the London terminal in 2008, when the brand new baggage system malfunctioned, leading to hundreds of flight cancellations.

I believed him. We all did. This, after all, was Germany, the industrial powerhouse renowned for its reliability and engineering skills.

Everyone was getting ready to write that Berlin Brandenburg Airport Willy Brandt (BER), named after West Germany's famous Cold War chancellor, would open on time, allowing the German capital to jettison a cumbersome legacy of its Cold War division with the closure of its two small, outdated western and eastern airports, Tegel and Schönefeld.

But just four days later, the airport turned into a national disgrace. The opening was postponed indefinitely because the firefighting system could not be completed in time. Then, in January, a new opening date for this year was scrapped, and now no one is daring even to predict when the hub, once dubbed "Europe's most modern airport" by its management, will be finished. The government says it may be in 2015.

Airlines, particularly Air Berlin, 29 per cent owned by Etihad Airways, face millions of euros in lost revenues because they have not been able to expand their services.

It is hard to believe but construction at the site has been at a standstill for almost a year. It is a ghost airport, the silence occasionally pierced by a lone drill or the arrival of an empty train in the underground station - a measure to keep the station ventilated. Only the lights are on, day and night, not entirely intentionally, though. The airport's technical director admits they cannot be shut off because of problems with the control system.

The airport's manager, Rainer Schwarz, was fired in January, the government is suing the architect, Meinhard von Gerkan, for €80 million (Dh381.9m) in compensation and an inspection is underway to catalogue the construction flaws - according to media reports, they number up to 40,000.

To name some of the bigger ones: the complex smoke extraction system does not work properly; the escalators from the railway station are too short; the air conditioning system is too weak to stop the central computer system overheating; not enough room was left for underfloor cabling; components of the jet refuelling system will have to be replaced; and there are not enough check-in counters. In addition, the whole airport, designed to handle 27 million passengers per year, is too small, say experts. The two existing airports handled 25 million passengers last year - and Berlin is growing fast as a tourist destination. It is already Europe's third-biggest, behind London and Paris.

The chaos has not just angered Berliners, local politicians and airlines. It is viewed as a national disgrace that could end up depriving German construction and engineering firms of international contracts.

"Our global reputation is at stake," said the transport minister Peter Ramsauer. "We want to keep on carrying out big projects and exporting them around the world."

Part of the blame has been pinned on amateurish supervision by the paymasters - the national government and the regional governments of Berlin and Brandenburg - since construction began in 2006.

Another problem was that politicians kept demanding expensive changes to the design, such as upgrading the veneer of the interior to an elegant walnut, insisting on limestone floor tiles and ordering an expensive relocation of the planned two-storey jetway for the giant flagship A380 Airbus jets.

The cost of the airport has ballooned from an originally planned €1.7 billion in 2004 to €4.3bn at present. Few seriously believe that will be the final figure.

"An incredible number of things were done wrong," says Thomas Bauer, the president of Germany's construction industry federation.

"They didn't organise it properly from start to finish. And if you get one thing mixed up in such a complex project, it's hard to fix it. With big projects it happens too often that plans are altered mid-way and the construction firms then have to work through those changes."

But Mr Bauer insists it is not a sign of a wider malaisein the country .

"German engineering remains great. There's no doubt about that. We still build the largest buildings around the world, the best cars, the best industrial plants."

But the airport debacle is not an isolated one. Other major projects in Germany have been plagued by cost overruns and delays.

Experts say German red tape is partly to blame, along with the nation's reluctance to embrace public-private partnership in big projects, a concept that has been proven to work well in other countries.

Some say politicians often opt for unrealistically cheap tenders because they are easier to get accepted by voters. So cost overruns are preprogrammed, as in many countries.

Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish professor of city planning at Oxford University who has researched the budget overshoots of hundreds of projects around the world, recommends compensating for this optimism bias by adding a risk supplement from the start to arrive at a more realistic figure for the amount projects will end up costing.

"We need to be much more realistic about risk and stop believing fairy tales. We need to have more thorough risk assessments," he says. His methods are already in use in Britain. But in Germany, boosting cost estimates in such a way would not be allowed, says a spokesman for the transport ministry.

Teutonic perfectionism has been identified by some as a further drawback. In practice, rigorous adherence to the plan does not always work. Germans need to get better at improvising, a skill that enabled Britain to get ready in time for the 2012 London Olympics.

"It's a fact we are sinking in a sea of regulations no one can grasp," says Albert Speer, a German architect and city planner who has worked on projects around the world.

There may be a faint light at the end of the tunnel for BER, though.

Last month, the airport hired Hartmut Mehdorn, a no-nonsense septuagenarian problem solver, as the new airport chief executive. He has already ruffled feathers by suggesting Tegel should remain open alongside BER, which would then lose its status as Berlin's only hub.

"They hired me," he says.

"Now they're going to have to put up with me."