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.
Tegel is one of my favorite airports in Germany since I can reach it from central Berlin in 20 minutes by public transport and in the main terminal most gates are less than 5 minutes away from the entrance, so you could in theory arrive 40 minutes before your plane departs.
The building is very old of course and you can see that it far exceeds the capacity for which it was planned, still in terms of convenience it's hard to beat, and I'm not looking forward to having to fly from BER sometime in the future (though I'm pretty confident it won't fully open before 2025, if ever).
I flew from and to Tegel once or twice per week on average last year. I find Tegel to actually be quite ok. Getting there on the TXL is quite convenient from many places in the city, and most importantly doesn't take very long (as opposed to Schönefeld/BER, which is rather far out). The interior could use a remodeling, but the layout is convenient because it has a security checkpoint per gate. I'm sure that is more expensive to operate than the single checkpoint per terminal model that is common these days, but it is quite efficient for getting to your gate.
> and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially)
This is false. Both are accessible with a trip on the metro U7 (which cuts the entire city NW<>SE) plus a tiny/short (depending on the airport) bus trip.
We're talking about 30/45 minutes, the large part of whom is on a very frequent metro line. By airport connection standards, this is very convenient (besides being cheap).
> awful, way over capacity, bad facilities
"awful" doesn't mean anything in this context.
Capacity is not so immediate to assess. While terminal C has a standard structure with two security checkpoints, terminal A has checkin and gates directly connected, which makes them very efficient (checkin queues develop in a corridor, essentially, but due to the checkin/gate efficiency, they don't last long).
Facilities are not "bad" - they're not modern, which is different (ie. computing stations). This is obviously a pain for people who need to be plugged 24/7 to a socket, but there's plenty of airports with an old structure.
I'm not much for travelling, but Tegel is one of few destinations I look forward to.
It sure feels like a bygone era. A luxury in the small. Like cheating out on all the hateful things about flying. Exit the gates and enter the city.
It's understandable that it won't last, but until then anyone can get a taste of how convenient flying must have seemed when you weren't shuttled out to a remote location and held for hours in a Gibsonian dystopia without the tech until finally left to move on.
Berlin is different from other European capitals in that it is the political and cultural center of the country, but not economically. It is also surrounded by low-density countryside, and located nowhere close to the geographic middle of the country.
As a result, air traffic is somewhat low with about 33 million passenger p.a. Heathrow alone gets almost three times as much.
The reason for having two (and, previously, three) smaller airports instead of a single, large one are obviously historical: both East and West Berlin each needed their own. In those times, traffic was even lower because few people in the East ever got to fly, West Berlin had basically no industry or business that was not exclusively local, and the population of West Berlin tended to be somewhat poorer as well.
I’ve made 17 total flights in and out of TXL and SXF in the last 12 months, and while I agree that SXF is terrible (it reminds me of Nairobi airport), I like TXL. I prefer both TXL and SXF to London Luton, and TXL alone to London Gatwick, London Heathrow, and London Stansted. I find TXL about equal to London City.
Hate to do this, but having lived in Berlin for over a decade and flown out of more than half the major airports on Earth, Tegel is awesome and more airports should be like it.
I strongly agree, and what's more I have heard more than once of firms choosing to establish a European base in Lisbon over Berlin simply because of the airport connections.
Whilst we're ragging on Schönefeld, my least favourite part is having to walk through burger king to get to the departure gates.
> 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.
This is part of Berlin's unique culture, though, isn't it? Usually, the capital cities aren't also average to below average in living costs, which Berlin is. Berlin isn't convenient, Berlin is dirty, raw and cheap.
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.
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.
As an American I rather liked Tegel (and the cute little I [hexagon] TXL bumper stickers I'd see periodically). It's small, and I imagine when things go wrong they'll go really wrong. Although I'm somewhat used to that at SFO with the fog, I'm glad I missed the German Air Force crash at SXF by a day or two since everything to diverted to TXL. Compared to London City there was dramatically less walking at Tegel and the public transit connections were better. While London transit will accept NFC payments, Berlin requires an app (albeit one of the best transit apps I've used).
The only airport that I've visited that really stood out as being awful was Amsterdam. It took about three miles of walking to get to the gate (from the "airport" Hilton), there was absolute chaos between the security checkpoint and passport control (wall to wall passengers, no indication where the lines started or ended, no airport staff, etc), and Americans flying Delta (but not KLM) get singled out for extra interrogation at the gate. God forbid you want to buy a train ticket.
To all the mentioned faults I would also add that most of Schönefeld has serious accessibility issues. I've seen a few times people with disabilities completely at a loss. And both airports have problems with staff being rude.
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.
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.
Airports do have to be very carefully designed as you say. They are a complex set of interconnected facilities. But the upshot of this are dozens of different specialist teams who have conflicting interests. Communication is difficult and it is hard to maintain consistent state.
In an operational airport this complexity still exists and major airports are in a constant state of flux. They are always building something and there are always contractors on site doing construction or maintenance. The difference is that it can be treated as an incremental improvement. No one can pretend that the entire system will be optimal first time. Of course the requirements will evolve.
> 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.
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.
> If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time.
This is nonsense. It's just that infrastructure projects that get delivered on schedule and on budget (or somewhat close to that) don't make for equally pretty HN headlines.
There's a lot of public infrastructure around. The vast majority of it was commissioned by politicians. The vast majority of it is just there, mentioned a few times in the local rag before commission and upon opening and that's it.
Sure, I wouldn't be surprised if public spending is more often out of budget or behind schedule than private spending like you suggest. But even then, Berlin Brandenburg is an exceptional case and suggesting that excesses like it are inevitable when politicians were involved is just nuts. There's plenty of competent politicians.
Politicans of all flavours, in all countries, for nearly all projects seems.
Yet just about every IT, aircraft and building project etc in the private sector comes in on time and under budget. Oh, wait, it barely ever happens there either!
Maybe it's large projects per se then. Maybe there's added risk when politicians and private sector interrelate.
If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time.
My son talks a lot about a study that showed optimists badly underestimated how long a project would take. So did pessimists, though their estimates were less egregiously wrong.
Basically, if people are involved, you can assume that budgets and time estimates are hand-wavy, ballpark guestimates at best.
Life will get in the way. Even people who truly understand that will fail to accurately predict just how much life will get in their way.
If you always give the contract to the company that offers the lowest price, don't be surprised that it eventually gets too low to cover the real costs.
80k for a project that likely consists of months of filing for permits, coordinating tens of people and machines? Sounds like a joke.
The store is the same everywhere. I find very little info about the New Karolinska hospital in English, but it ended up being several billion SEK more expensive than planned. The cost is spread out over 30ish years,but it has already cost 18bn SEK (1.8bn EUR).
> 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.
So it’s not a surprise that we find counter examples in strong democracies. The Gotthard Basistunnel was build faster than projected and about 30% cheaper [1].
Genuine question but have there been studies comparing public and private construction projects and whether or not both go overboard financially/time-wise?
> 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."
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...
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
[+] [-] davnicwil|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ThePhysicist|6 years ago|reply
The building is very old of course and you can see that it far exceeds the capacity for which it was planned, still in terms of convenience it's hard to beat, and I'm not looking forward to having to fly from BER sometime in the future (though I'm pretty confident it won't fully open before 2025, if ever).
[+] [-] phreeza|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizza234|6 years ago|reply
This is false. Both are accessible with a trip on the metro U7 (which cuts the entire city NW<>SE) plus a tiny/short (depending on the airport) bus trip.
We're talking about 30/45 minutes, the large part of whom is on a very frequent metro line. By airport connection standards, this is very convenient (besides being cheap).
> awful, way over capacity, bad facilities
"awful" doesn't mean anything in this context.
Capacity is not so immediate to assess. While terminal C has a standard structure with two security checkpoints, terminal A has checkin and gates directly connected, which makes them very efficient (checkin queues develop in a corridor, essentially, but due to the checkin/gate efficiency, they don't last long).
Facilities are not "bad" - they're not modern, which is different (ie. computing stations). This is obviously a pain for people who need to be plugged 24/7 to a socket, but there's plenty of airports with an old structure.
[+] [-] xorcist|6 years ago|reply
It sure feels like a bygone era. A luxury in the small. Like cheating out on all the hateful things about flying. Exit the gates and enter the city.
It's understandable that it won't last, but until then anyone can get a taste of how convenient flying must have seemed when you weren't shuttled out to a remote location and held for hours in a Gibsonian dystopia without the tech until finally left to move on.
[+] [-] shaki-dora|6 years ago|reply
As a result, air traffic is somewhat low with about 33 million passenger p.a. Heathrow alone gets almost three times as much.
The reason for having two (and, previously, three) smaller airports instead of a single, large one are obviously historical: both East and West Berlin each needed their own. In those times, traffic was even lower because few people in the East ever got to fly, West Berlin had basically no industry or business that was not exclusively local, and the population of West Berlin tended to be somewhat poorer as well.
[+] [-] ben_w|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkachowski|6 years ago|reply
Whilst we're ragging on Schönefeld, my least favourite part is having to walk through burger king to get to the departure gates.
[+] [-] luckylion|6 years ago|reply
This is part of Berlin's unique culture, though, isn't it? Usually, the capital cities aren't also average to below average in living costs, which Berlin is. Berlin isn't convenient, Berlin is dirty, raw and cheap.
[+] [-] martinald|6 years ago|reply
It's really the worst airport I've been to and as you say makes the whole situation a lot worse.
[+] [-] inferiorhuman|6 years ago|reply
As an American I rather liked Tegel (and the cute little I [hexagon] TXL bumper stickers I'd see periodically). It's small, and I imagine when things go wrong they'll go really wrong. Although I'm somewhat used to that at SFO with the fog, I'm glad I missed the German Air Force crash at SXF by a day or two since everything to diverted to TXL. Compared to London City there was dramatically less walking at Tegel and the public transit connections were better. While London transit will accept NFC payments, Berlin requires an app (albeit one of the best transit apps I've used).
The only airport that I've visited that really stood out as being awful was Amsterdam. It took about three miles of walking to get to the gate (from the "airport" Hilton), there was absolute chaos between the security checkpoint and passport control (wall to wall passengers, no indication where the lines started or ended, no airport staff, etc), and Americans flying Delta (but not KLM) get singled out for extra interrogation at the gate. God forbid you want to buy a train ticket.
[+] [-] gameoflife|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
Game over
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FabHK|6 years ago|reply
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_...
[+] [-] paulddraper|6 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] 7952|6 years ago|reply
In an operational airport this complexity still exists and major airports are in a constant state of flux. They are always building something and there are always contractors on site doing construction or maintenance. The difference is that it can be treated as an incremental improvement. No one can pretend that the entire system will be optimal first time. Of course the requirements will evolve.
[+] [-] continuations|6 years ago|reply
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
[2] https://www.gobankingrates.com/making-money/business/lax-air...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_International_Airpor...
[+] [-] thg|6 years ago|reply
And there's also Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie: 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.
[+] [-] skrebbel|6 years ago|reply
This is nonsense. It's just that infrastructure projects that get delivered on schedule and on budget (or somewhat close to that) don't make for equally pretty HN headlines.
There's a lot of public infrastructure around. The vast majority of it was commissioned by politicians. The vast majority of it is just there, mentioned a few times in the local rag before commission and upon opening and that's it.
Sure, I wouldn't be surprised if public spending is more often out of budget or behind schedule than private spending like you suggest. But even then, Berlin Brandenburg is an exceptional case and suggesting that excesses like it are inevitable when politicians were involved is just nuts. There's plenty of competent politicians.
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|6 years ago|reply
Yet just about every IT, aircraft and building project etc in the private sector comes in on time and under budget. Oh, wait, it barely ever happens there either!
Maybe it's large projects per se then. Maybe there's added risk when politicians and private sector interrelate.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
My son talks a lot about a study that showed optimists badly underestimated how long a project would take. So did pessimists, though their estimates were less egregiously wrong.
Basically, if people are involved, you can assume that budgets and time estimates are hand-wavy, ballpark guestimates at best.
Life will get in the way. Even people who truly understand that will fail to accurately predict just how much life will get in their way.
[+] [-] literallycancer|6 years ago|reply
80k for a project that likely consists of months of filing for permits, coordinating tens of people and machines? Sounds like a joke.
[+] [-] bjoli|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lixtra|6 years ago|reply
So it’s not a surprise that we find counter examples in strong democracies. The Gotthard Basistunnel was build faster than projected and about 30% cheaper [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
[+] [-] bosie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elcomet|6 years ago|reply
I think we are just bad at estimating costs and time.
[+] [-] Barjak|6 years ago|reply
I'm reminded of that $2M bathroom at a public park in NYC.
This is the video. There's some libertarian editorialization, but the facts themselves are solid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8
[+] [-] welder|6 years ago|reply
> 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."
[+] [-] Rockslide|6 years ago|reply
The manner in which this all unfolded is however a completely different story...
[+] [-] allengeorge|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paulddraper|6 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] consp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomglynch|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samcday|6 years ago|reply
EDIT: </satire>
[+] [-] rkachowski|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jacek|6 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/
[+] [-] nayuki|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willyt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohthehugemanate|6 years ago|reply
* 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
[+] [-] timkam|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NewsAware|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccjnson|6 years ago|reply
Is there an issue tracker specific to physical engineering projects?
[+] [-] buttcoinslol|6 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] Gyonka|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielam|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Central_Polish_Airport [1] https://centreforaviation.com/data/profiles/newairports/new-...
[+] [-] pjmlp|6 years ago|reply
Almost every German comedy series has a jab at it.
[+] [-] lazyjones|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tomte|6 years ago|reply
In Germany they did many times, for all kinds of reasons (mostly fire response).