The NeverEnding Multistory
October 5, 2020 3:50 PM   Subscribe

Berlin Brandenburg Airport will finally be opening at the end of this month. Billions over budget and nine years behind schedule, the airport’s woes have inspired a boardgame, UnberechenBER – Das verrückte Flughafenspie (“How much taxpayer money can you waste while designing and constructing an airport?”) and a videogame, Chaotic Airport Construction Manager (Win/Mac/Linux). posted by adrianhon (39 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
The Never-ending Multistory-eeee
Woah-oh-oh-ohhhh oh-oh-oh ohhhh
/Limahl
posted by hippybear at 3:59 PM on October 5, 2020 [5 favorites]


2020 just won't let up, will it?
posted by tclark at 4:09 PM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


Jokes aside this is good news. Tegel is a sad, sad airport, a terrible greeting for Germany's capitol and one of Europe's great cities. The only bummer is the new airport is 30km out of town. Although they built a dedicated train line; I think it's ready to open?
posted by Nelson at 4:14 PM on October 5, 2020 [3 favorites]


And people say Germans are humorless.
posted by Glomar response at 4:16 PM on October 5, 2020 [6 favorites]


Nice to know that Siemens is just as easy to work with in their home country.

If you want the TLDR on this disaster, probably half of the cost and schedule overruns are attributable to 2 things:

1. Major design changes requested mid-project with inadequate schedule adjustment

2. Low voltage systems coordination

I used to be in aviation design. The importance of 1 and 2 above isn’t exactly a secret. Projects tend to take more time and money when you have to build them twice.
posted by q*ben at 4:49 PM on October 5, 2020 [4 favorites]


Is there a German word for "So do you want the good news or the bad news first?"
posted by carter at 5:00 PM on October 5, 2020


oh Nelson, why must you slander my beloved circular Tegel? A dedicated train line would be a bonus though, I am very very tired of the TXL airport bus.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 5:00 PM on October 5, 2020 [7 favorites]


Almost exactly a year ago I was on a flight from New York JFK to Tegel airport, on my way to visit Berlin and Germany for the first time for a couple of days. (Ah, those bygone days of international travel...)

I remember landing and shuffling to get up and wondering why it was taking so long, even for a big widebody airplane, to get off the plane -- then there was an announcement which clarified that there wasn't enough space for everyone to get off the plane before the passport control booth, so the line literally backed up right into the plane.

I think Tegel is fascinating as a piece of history, and I'm glad I've flown into it, but I look forward (hopefully, one day...) to be able to fly into the new Berlin airport and arrive with slightly more space.

Although they built a dedicated train line; I think it's ready to open?

Indeed, Deutsche Bahn has to run empty trains through the station in order to keep it ventilated and to avoid the effects of humidity.
posted by andrewesque at 5:02 PM on October 5, 2020 [2 favorites]


Tegel is a sad, sad airport

Tegel is the best airport in the world! Transportation is in the middle, and check in desks, security, departure lounges and actual planes are in concentric rings, so you barely have to walk anywhere. Closing it is a crime.
posted by grahamparks at 5:03 PM on October 5, 2020 [5 favorites]


So, is the game any good as a game?
posted by acb at 5:17 PM on October 5, 2020


If you're fond of Tegel you clearly have never been banished to the outskirts of Terminal D. ("You are entering the American sector.") Long walk, dismal building, crowded with no room for servicing a large flight. It's a fine small town airport for short flights around Europe and I'm sympathetic to Berliners who want to keep it around for the convenience. But it was a mess for larger or longer flights.

Also somewhere about 25 years ago airport designers realized that if you built high ceiling spacious cathedrals you could let in a lot of light and make passengers much happier. Tegel is, um, not a beneficiary of such spaciousness. (Compare the new Hauptbahnhof; it's beautiful!) The pictures I've seen of the new airport there's finally some space and light although while the ceiling is high, it is still oppressively flat.

probably half of the cost and schedule overruns are attributable to 2 things

Is the other half entirely attributable to Alfredo di Mauro, the fake engineer who designed the fire system that was the reason the airport wasn't able to open? "Everyone thought I was an engineer, I just didn't contradict them." Maybe the third half is Jochen Großmann's fault; he was the tech chief who got convicted of accepting bribes and other forms of fraud.

Then there's still the question of how this happened in Germany, Berlin no less. I love Germany and greatly respect its reputation for competent technocratic government. I wish I were living in Berlin right now. But something sure went wrong here.
posted by Nelson at 5:20 PM on October 5, 2020 [7 favorites]


Whatever happened to German efficiency, planning, punctuality? Leute, was ist denn da los?
posted by nikoniko at 6:21 PM on October 5, 2020


I'm trying to dig up an interview with the architect who designed both Tegel and the new airport in Schönefeld.

What stood out to me; the brief for Tegel was to make the experience as efficient and speedy as possible. The brief for Schönefeld was to have people walk past as many shops as possible.

I will miss Tegel, as a Berliner. But it's just too overcrowded in there.
posted by romanb at 6:39 PM on October 5, 2020 [2 favorites]


The airport of memes finally falls.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:08 PM on October 5, 2020


What's low voltage systems coordination?

Also why was a mid-project redesign necessary?
posted by geoff. at 7:13 PM on October 5, 2020


What's low voltage systems coordination?

In large public buildings there's usually a bunch of ancillary systems that usually work off low voltage lines. Stuff like fire alarms (and fire suppression systems), security access systems (proximity card pads on doors), video cameras, public address systems. These all run at dramatically lower than 230 volts, usually like 24V. Normally you need to have power for all of these and you also need backup power for all of these, especially the fire system.

Also why was a mid-project redesign necessary?

With the system that was specced out/installed, the low voltage backup power was dramatically undersized. If the power went out and there was a fire there wouldn't be enough power to work the sprinklers to fight the fire. When you have a building that has the potential to have thousands upon thousands of people in it at any one time this is generally considered a Bad Thing™.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:27 PM on October 5, 2020 [12 favorites]


If this subject actually works well as a game, may I suggest to its crafters our mighty twin world-class Honolulu boondoggles as fodder for a sequel? (1) The Superferry (RIP), and (2) the Rapid Transit (proudly in snail-like and intrusive construction since ~20XX).

In 2008, I actually landed at a Berlin airport from a long Honolulu-based flight. Donʻt know if it was the maligned Tegel, but it seemed to consist of just a surprisingly tiny ʻnʻ tidy building, maybe about twice as big as our Molokai (pop. 7345) airport terminal ... I exaggerate slightly ... and in my glee at putting feet on German soil at last, I thought how refreshing that Berliners think so nicely small, especially after those fast ʻnʻ vast stopovers at the Houston airport and Heathrow.
posted by Droll Lord at 7:45 PM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


Vollglas oder Halbglas.

Shoulda hired Bechtel.
posted by clavdivs at 8:00 PM on October 5, 2020


I visited Berlin for the first time last year. The airport surprised me as a small, dark thing, more of a regional airport than a hub.
posted by doctornemo at 8:28 PM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


My only visit to Berlin was in 1987 as a high school exchange student on a class trip (they do actual class trips in Germany, shipping off 30 students to a city for a week!), and my copy of USA Today was confiscated at Checkpoint Alpha on the bus, and I was given a receipt in case I wanted to get it back on my way out.

Germany during the Cold War was surreal to a level that is hard to imagine today. Every time I hear Trump talk about his border wall, I know that his ideal would be the InterGerman Border from back then, which was a nightmare I saw in person. My photo is probably in some ancient archive photographed from observation platforms on the East side.
posted by hippybear at 8:35 PM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


(Also my old passport has a DDR stamp on it, which is a thing I treasure in some weird way.)
posted by hippybear at 8:36 PM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


Tegel is a sad, sad airport, a terrible greeting for Germany's capitol and one of Europe's great cities.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I genuinely love Tegel. It feels human sized in a way that many airports don't, or used to but never will again. It reminds me of the before times when friends and families could drop people off at their gate amd wait with them before saying goodbye. No endless conveyor-belted corridors, no realizing you're in danger of missing your connection because it's going to take 40 minutes to get from a gate all the way at the end of one terminal to a gate all the way at the end of another one, possibly transferring shuttles in the process. It has the quickest security lines I've ever waited on. It's so close to the city that the first time I landed there, my boyfriend and I were able to take the bus to the zoo even though we were on a three-hour layover to Copenhagen. If I feel nervous or bored or aimless, I can circumnabulate the airport, which calms me down. It's a comfort. Airports like Heathrow and Schiphol may be cleaner and fancier and more efficient, but Tegel definitely has a place in my heart, and I kind of hope it doesn't go away, even though we seem to have entered some kind of parallel universe in which Berlin Brandenburg is functional.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 10:18 PM on October 5, 2020 [7 favorites]


Also: I finally got to visit Tempelhof on my last trip and holy shit airfields are huge.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 10:31 PM on October 5, 2020 [3 favorites]


I lived in Berlin from 2007 to 2019, and I loved Tegel. It felt like going back in time, to when flying was a luxury. The airport's design feels like it's treating you like the way you want to be treated, so that it's efficient for you and not for the airline.

You can walk up to your gate with 30 minutes before your flight. It's a 100m walk at most from the bus station, which is right outside the door. You can walk directly to your gate and the people seeing you off, because the security check is for your gate. The baggage drop off is at the front door, if you have any. When you return, the baggage carousel is in the gate, so you wait there for your bags. It's so much faster.

And then the airport's actually in the city instead of an hour by train outside it. I recall friends who had international flights in the 6-7 AM hour would think they should arrive 120 minutes before their flight, but we had to keep telling them, no, the building Tegel is closed at 4:00. The lights are off and it's locked. The airport is actually in the city and so the flights stop at a reasonable hour.

I have a fond memory of my roommate picking me up from Tegel when I moved to Germany. She not only met me at the gate, but then we exited the airport across the hallway from the gate. Tegel is hexagon shaped and 1 floor. There are exits outdoors everywhere. You can just walk outside to your car!

At the time I thought it was a intentional, but I think in retrospect this was just the way Berlin was. Lots of space, some neglect mixed with an old style, and not so many people. It was more about service and people and less about efficiency of the system. I'll miss it.
posted by cotterpin at 11:57 PM on October 5, 2020 [5 favorites]


I ⬡ Tegel
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:09 AM on October 6, 2020 [8 favorites]


They ran out of people to bribe. (Well, that's what I heard. What they finally realized was - you grift below ten percent of the total contract price or you trigger an audit and that kept things from getting even crazier.)

My earlier comment about bribery and BER.

About a year ago a friend told me he gets down to BER at night to race bicycles on the runways. I found this image poignant as hell - a knot of thirty bikes zipping around the empty runways, under the lights.

And of course all those diesel VWs that had faked emissions chips and thus couldn't be sold were parked out there for a while, too.

And while Tegel has its own significant charms (it is a supremely easy airport to get in and out of, though, yes Terminal D is almost JFK level horrid. The whole airport is operating at something like 300% capacity and you feel it. Of course BER, Tegel and the HBF (a great train station) were all designed by the same guy!) I remember flying out of Marine Terminal at LaGuardia once and that was - charming. For that matter, the old bar on the second story of the main LaGuardia terminal, the one that looked out over the runways and had a huge mural behind the bar. Big windows. It was like living in a story about New York City that didn't know it was over. I had drinks there a number of times, back in the 80's.

BER has a hell of a poetic history behind it already - it was supposed to just be a new airport but it has already lived at least four 'lives.' With things as they stand now with COVID gutting international travel, who knows what exactly it's next, intended 'life' will go.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:51 AM on October 6, 2020 [1 favorite]




Yeah, a friend of mine was at one of those tests. Turns out - it's not even a particularly nice and/or user-friendly airport. No electric sockets for passengers at the gates. But then that's expected - it was planned and designed before people had devices the need to charge all the time…
posted by dominik at 2:01 AM on October 6, 2020


The brief for Schönefeld was to have people walk past as many shops as possible.

Wasn't Schönefeld built in the DDR?
posted by acb at 2:10 AM on October 6, 2020 [1 favorite]


This came up after a German friend picked me up at Tegel a few years ago. She bemoaned the delays. I just laughed and told her about the Second Avenue Subway.
posted by the_blizz at 2:11 AM on October 6, 2020 [2 favorites]


Honolulu boondoggles

I would 100% play a game called Honolulu boondoggles.
Just for the record...
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:40 AM on October 6, 2020 [2 favorites]


Wasn't Schönefeld built in the DDR?

By Schönefeld I meant the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport which is being built on the grounds of the old Schönefeld Airport (yes, DDR) which is still operational. Sorry, that wasn't very clear.
posted by romanb at 2:55 AM on October 6, 2020


Like many engineering cock-ups, this was due to not having finished the detailed design before beginning construction. That's not unusual and it is always the case that some detail decisions are made on site but you're risking rework and it's a fine balance when to start on site relative to detailed design. See also EDF which started building its first two EPR reactors before the detailed design was done and ended up with a number of months-long standstill periods where all their specialist construction staff were being paid for thumb twiddling while they frantically revised elements of the design.
posted by atrazine at 3:39 AM on October 6, 2020


Schönefeld (the DDR one) is basically the LaGuardia of Europe but less comfy.

Also anyone who thinks Germans are efficient has never met or dealt with actual Germans. They are thorough and punctual, but the efficiency myth has got to be one of the best coups of myth over fact I've seen.

As a Berliner nearing my year anniversary, these are my opinions.
posted by dame at 4:58 AM on October 6, 2020 [7 favorites]


Also I will miss Tegel.
posted by dame at 4:58 AM on October 6, 2020


My experience with German engineering is that they are very detail-oriented. Even when the details are completely wrong.
posted by notsnot at 6:35 AM on October 6, 2020 [4 favorites]


I've flown out of Tiegel twice and its small size has its pros and cos: yes, it's easy to get through, but the gate waiting areas are packed and there aren't many amenities. Plus it just feels cramped relative to newer airports with higher ceilings and wider corridors. And I'm sure it just can't handle the volume of planes that want to land there.

But German transport infrastructure is pretty great compared to North America so who cares to some extent - it's trivial to fly out of several other German airports that aren't that far away (again, at least by NA standards).

Also German airports have odd concessions relative to NA - there are totally normal shopping-mall-level clothing stores in Tiegel and Cologne-Bonn. Which I thought was odd until my daughter showed up on a family trip to Germany at Cologne-Bonn on a Sunday but her suitcase was quite lost and we ended up buying her a fresh set of clothes at Marc O'Polo (which is a weird store name, but whatever) and man, I tell you, it suddenly seemed like a very good idea.
posted by GuyZero at 10:27 AM on October 6, 2020


Speaking of megaproject boondoggles, at least it's not the Site C Dam on the Peace River in Northern BC...
posted by blue shadows at 12:22 PM on October 6, 2020


New Airport, Beleaguered Symbol of ‘Irreverent’ Berlin, Is Opening at Long Last
But this time, insists Engelbert Lütke Daldrup, the airport’s chief executive, everything is functioning. Perhaps the biggest incentive to make sure the airport opens, he said, is not to be “laughed at” anymore.
posted by Nelson at 11:00 AM on October 24, 2020


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