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Berlin has some truly atrocious, horrifying things in its past—its airports.
They’re just bad and ancient.
Tegel airport, for example, is worse rated on Google than the nearby prison and Schönefeld,
meanwhile, is worse rated than Aleppo airport which is in an active war-zone.
But why are there two bad airports instead of just one?
Well, that’s because, decades ago, it was rather difficult to get from this side of
Berlin to this side.
Basically, World War Two ended, the city was split up into zones administered by the different
allies, and the Soviets, figuring that making their bit of the city not-suck would be harder,
just built a wall to stop everyone from leaving for West Berlin.
Given that, there were the airports for West Berlin, Tempelhof and Tegal, and there was
the airport for East Berlin, Schönefeld.
When the wall became not, the city therefore had three airports, one of which closed down
in 2008.
This was inefficient so the city decided to build one, big, not sucky airport.
After many committees and conferences and comments they decided on a site—they would
build the new airport directly south of the old Schönefeld airport and that way they
could use one of the old runways for the new airport.
Fast forward to 2012, the era of Gangham Style, Honey Boo Boo, and the end of the world, and
the airport was nearly finished so Berlin got ready for a massive moving operation.
On the night on June 2nd, the last ever aircraft would land and each of Berlin’s bad, old
airports and then, throughout the night, all the people and equipment from them would drive
their way over to the new Brandenburg Airport.
The planning for this move had been going on for years—the city would close major
highways, TV networks were arranging live coverage, extra staff had been hired, airlines
had sold tickets from the new airport for months, Lufthansa planned a celebratory a380
flight to mark the first arrival to the new airport, Angela Merkel was scheduled to attend
an opening ceremony, it was all about to happen until, just 26 days before move, the word
came down that it would not happen—the opening was delayed.
That was 2012.
Nowadays, in 2019, that new airport, Berlin Brandenburg Airport, is still nowhere near
opening.
Here’s what happened with this Fyre festival of an airport.
Construction began on September 5, 2006.
Bob and the other builders worked relatively fast and by 2011, the airport was looking
enough like an airport that they started tests where more than 10,000 volunteers would check-in
a bag, go through security, board a dummy plane, and then go and collect their bags
at the baggage claim.
The airport looked like it was almost ready for opening and shops were already leased
out and getting ready for opening but that’s when problems emerged.
In what was thought to be the final days of construction, a lot of what was going on was
certifying that different aspects of the airport wouldn’t kill people.
That’s the job of cars—the worst method of transportation (don’t @ me.)
The German inspectors, though, were especially concerned with making sure that the airport’s
fire alarm and suppression system was up to snuff given that only 15 years earlier the
worst airport fire in the history of airport fires had destroyed much of Dusseldorf airport,
elsewhere in Germany.
Therefore, they simulated a fire by releasing smoke and my mixtape.
Some alarms went off, many did not, some others went off but in the complete wrong part of
the building, and it turned out that the mess of wiring that was causing all these alarm
issues was, in and of itself, a fire hazard and apparently the inspectors didn’t subscribe
to the, “fight fire with fire,” methodology.
It was also found that the vents built to suck out smoke just simply didn’t work and
would likely implode in a real fire.
Long story short: the airport’s fire system was a complete failure.
The fire inspectors felt it worthwhile to point out that the nearby Tropical Islands
Resort, a waterpark, had a more complicated fire suppression system that actually worked—the
implication being that the waterpark was better designed than the airport.
The project managers desperately wanted to open on time, though, so they proposed that,
instead of having an alarm system, they would hire 800 low-paid workers to stand around
the terminal and act as, “fire spotters.”
As much as I appreciate them writing my jokes for me, the inspectors didn’t and said,
“hell nein.”
The next day, 26 days before opening, the airport’s opening was delayed.
Over the next few years, opening was delayed and delayed and delayed again as they just
couldn’t fix that fire system.
It emerged that there were other issues as well, though—there weren’t enough check-in
desks for the expected passenger numbers, 4,000 doors were numbered incorrectly, and
for a period in 2015 construction workers weren’t even allowed in the building because
they were worried the roof could collapse.
Another huge issue, though, emerged in 2017.
The whole idea of the airport was to act as a large hub airport for Europe where passengers
would connect from flight to flight.
All the financial calculations were based on this—for example, the revenue of shops
was figuring that many passengers would be connecting through which would have them lingering
around longer.
The big crucial detail, though, was that there was only one airline with a hub in Berlin.
That was Air Berlin and in late 2017, Air Berlin became insolvent and shut down.
Therefore, Berlin’s major hub airport would have no airline hubs and with no airline hubs
there would be barely any connecting passengers.
The delays and their implications have become comical at this point—in 2018, the airport
had to replace 750 screens for departure boards at a cost of more than $500,000 since they
had left them on continuously for six years and they had reached the end of their service
lives.
Today, in 2019, the fire suppression system still is not working and the current official
opening date of October 2020 is looking less and less realistic.
Some have even suggested that the airport will never open and will just be torn down
completely.
Inside, though, the airport still sits there looking close to brand new but yet completely
non-functional—a modern, $8.5 billion airport that has never had a single passenger.
Back when Berlin was split in two, the Soviets blocked the Western allies’ supply routes
into West Berlin so there began a massive operation to fly in every bit of supplies
that West Berlin needed by plane in what came to be known as the Berlin airlift.
It was an absolutely massive and fascinating operation and luckily, there’s a great book
about it called, “the Candy Bombers.”
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