Berlin’s new airport nevertheless opens up: a story of failure and shame

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Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) is scheduled to open on 3 June 2012. This isn’t the first time the assignment has missed its deadline, but it’s the ultimate memorable.

The anticipation is so wonderful that public announcer rbb makes plans to broadcast it for 24 hours. The crisis was so wonderful thereafter that the German satirical site, The Postillon, was presented here with a new grammatical form to discuss the conditional opening of the airport, an occasion that continually caused the runway to never end. Produces.

Just before the opening date, inspectors reported some 120,000 defects, adding chimney protection issues, automatic doors that opened, and collapsed ceilings. Some 170,000 kilometers (106,000 miles) of cables installed at and around the airport were found to be dangerously connected. Lighting fixtures can simply be turned on; others may simply faint.

It took more than nine years, and a number of well-paid airport executives, to resolve the unrest of the new Berlin International Airport, also called Willy Brandt Airport, named after the vanquished leader of West Berlin and then West Germany. airport officials say they are in a position to take off, it is very likely that few aircraft will. The coronavirus pandemic has plunged air transport and industries into chaos. As of August, Berlin’s air passenger traffic was reduced by almost 70% compared to last year.

Read more: ” To the brands, set, try! ”: Long-delayed Berlin airport undergoes a test

Last opening date of BER 2012

In terms of capacity, this can be good news, even if it’s for the reason. BER was designed to accommodate 27 million passengers according to the year. In 2019, more than 35 million other people have passed through Tegel and Schonfeld, the last overcrowded area of Berlin. airports, which are expected to close and merge with BER, respectively. In addition to the fears of a pandemic, tourism analysts expect a stable accumulation in the number of guests in the German capital.

Expansion is already underway to meet the additional demand, which deserves a return sometime. This can charge an additional 2. 3 euro bill ($ 2. 7 bill) until 2030, almost as much as the initial budget for the project as a whole. more than 7 euro invoice (invoice of $ 8. 2), a shared invoice between the states of Berlin and Brandenburg and the German federal government, together, the FBB, the company that operates the Berlin airports and supervised the structure of the new .

Delays and surcharges coincided with pandemic losses. Without another three hundred million euros in government grants and loans, the German Ministry of Finance announced in September that the FBB would go bankrupt before the airport opened on 31 October. billions of euros in the coming years to keep them in the air. If the state does not need — or — it is looking for a way to privatize the business, even partially, those prices are left at the expense of taxpayers.

The world-famous Made-in-Germany logo was beaten. The airport was meant to be everything Berlin expected: a reunified global city worthy of being the capital of one of the world’s largest economies. it has become everything berlin has been mocked for a long time: incompetent public management and poor monetary management, unable to carry out primary projects.

The task got off to a complicated start. First conceived in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, it took six years to settle on land to be built, but the official opening was not realized for another decade. blinked red, leaving the state alone to finance and oversee construction. Even the airport’s original code, BBI (Berlin-Brandenburg International), had to be relocated because an airport in India was already relocated.

Whether by new state requests or by updating European Union security rules, airport architects had to replenish their plans, the initial opening in October 2011 had to be postponed by 8 months, largely due to the failure of one of the project’s main contractors, which would remain more bankrupt.

In his e-book “Black Box BER”, leading architect Meinhard von Gerkan accused the political tension of doing the work, despite the “protests of assignment management”. He and others accused the FBB of trying to solve the problems, manipulating the reports before they reached the supervisory board, which at the time was headed through The Mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, a prominent airport advocate.

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In May 2012, just a few weeks before the scheduled opening, BER refused the operating authorization. Wowereit resigned from the supervisory board in late 2014. Gerkan and his team were sent to pack. His replacements searched in vain for structure plans, however, some ended up in a trash can, an incident that triggered a police investigation. Engelbert Latke Daldrup, a mid-level career official, has been president of the FBB since 2017, the fourth user to hold office since the airport is behind schedule the initial opening.

Aside from public embarrassment, 3 investigations by parliamentary committees, as well as years of public outrage and prying eyes, have had no consequences for anyone involved in the decades-long state-sponsored debacle. However, the case went through state prosecutors.

The fiasco would probably not end with the opening of BER on October 31. Critics question whether an airport designed in the early 2000s supports generation and patterns in 2020 and beyond.

The airport is named after former Berlin mayor and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt

The German railway company, Deutsche Bahn, has no immediate plans to offer a high-speed rail link, as other primary German airports have done. Only a long-distance exercise will avoid ber; Otherwise, passengers will have to perform a local or regional exercise to get to Berlin and replace the central station to continue their adventure, or take the non-ecological direction by connecting to a domestic flight.

Government officials, adding Chancellor Angela Merkel, would possibly also face disadvantages. When Germany moved its capital from Bonn to Berlin after reunification, its fleet of aircraft did not emerge due to a lack of area at Berlin’s small airports. that, however, the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, say there is only enough area to house seven of its 19 aircraft there; the rest will have to continue flying empty from Cologne-Bonn airport on the other side of the country to pick up VIP passengers, possibly to the chagrin of weather activists and government accountants.

Most airport investigators and the supervisory government concluded after years of setbacks and damaged promises that ber’s epic is a failure from start to finish. Many of the culprits will be present to celebrate their overdue opening.

This would possibly be a more discreet moment for those close to the airport’s famous namesake, Willy Brandt, while a spokesman for the Willy Brandt Foundation told DW that he welcomed the opening of the airport and his agreement with the vanquished chancellor, his youth. liked to remain silent.

Sabine Kinkartz contributed to this report.

Operators of airport control centres in Germany reported minimum waiting times and sufficiently good supplies. At the same time, Romania and Bulgaria, eu members, have been added to the German list of high-risk countries.

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