What a Disaster! The Story of Berlin Brandenburg Airport.

have you ever heard the term German efficiency well I can tell you that this is not a term that will fit well with the story I will tell you today about the insane development and launch of Brandenburg airport in Germany's capital Berlin it's made not just Berlin but the whole of Germany a laughing stuff stay tuned because this will be hilarious a common saying in the business world is that you should always strive to have zero failures in whatever it is that you're doing but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't plan for dealing with mistakes because you know they will most likely happen in fact your work will most likely ultimately be judged on how well you managed those mistakes this is a philosophy we use to highlight the importance of for example customer service but also contingency planning and threat and error management something that we pilot discuss and train on a daily basis but I like in aviation where we say that every approach is flown to a go around and every Landing is a bonus in the business World managers are often encouraged not to devote too much time worrying about how things could go wrong and that's because that type of mindset can often distract business Managers from their focus their goals and their ultimate targets So today we're going to look at Berlin's Brandenburg airport and how it became a spectacular example of how project management can go badly but also hilariously wrong officially this airport opened for business on the 31st of October 2020 but its history goes much much further back than that as East and West Germany began to unify after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 Berlin found itself with three airports in what was previously the Western section of the city and schoenefeld in the Eastern sector a bit further away from the city center all three of these airports were very old teagle was the newest inaugurated in 1948 and it played a key role during the famous Berlin airlift the attitude templehof and schoenefeld had already existed in some form since well before the second World War using all of these three airports might have made sense in the past but obviously this was not a great arrangement for the now reunified capital of Germany it also started to become obviously clear that airports like Temple of Antigo situated bang in the middle of the city had little to no Prospect of future expansion soon everyone agreed that what Berlin really needed was a new modern airport with good future expansion potential that they could use in case it would be needed so already back in 1991 a committee was formed tasked with finding a suitable location for this new airport in the area around Berlin and already here the first few delays in the program would start to creep in for any new airport near an established City a compromise has to be made between convenience and noise planners have to always balance the distance of the airport from the city against how many people will actually put up with being affected by the inevitable noise that the airport will create and on top of that the cost of buying up land nearby a city will generally be much higher than it will be a little bit further out now aside from the cost Factor it might be possible to get around this compromise by some extent by choosing a place that already has good Rail and Road Links to the city or where that type of links can be easily created and this is what the planners initially had in mind for Berlin's next airport they were looking at sites further to the south of the city which would solve all of these issues for them this election and vetting process took around five years to do and then in 1996 the decision was finally announced the airport that would replace Temple of teagle and chernfeld would be sure kind of at the time schoenefeld already had two reasonably long runways and I'm actually old enough to have landed on both of these old runways myself it only had one terminal building but in theory at least there was space enough to expand that terminal or even build a second mine close by but using the existing pair of runways wouldn't really be enough and that's because those runways were situated too close to each other to enable simultaneous takeoff and Landings So the plan then became to keep one of these runways the southernmost of the two and then build a second new Runway even further to the South by doing that the space between the two runways could then be used to build a new modern terminal with plenty of space for parking and future expansions if needed now this is a sort of design that most modern airports use today building this way creates room for plenty of parallel tax ways for each Runway making things much simpler for air traffic control and Pilots alike which helps the traffic flow a great new example of this is the new Doha Hamad International Airport in Qatar for example but after everyone had agreed on the general plan more delays started trickling in when the authorities had to pick which company that would actually be in charge of the design and construction of the airport the initial plans was to award a contract to private companies but for one reason or another this ultimately failed after having caused years of more delays to the project eventually the whole Affair instead became a public project managed by an organization owned by the city of Berlin the state of Brandenburg and the German federal republic to organize all this took another few years and then finally in 2006 the new airport project finally got its construction permit hooray now the build could finally begin a full 15 years after the decision to build it had been taken now up until this point this process was quite messy but not particularly unusual for a project as massive as this one sure there were a lot of delays and even some lawsuits from many people living in the approach and departure area of the new Runway but that's almost always the case and I don't really blame those people either because they hadn't signed up for an airport on top of them when they bought their properties around 370 people had also been reallocated to new homes elsewhere because their Villages were actually located where the new terminal and Runway would be built but again that's nothing unusual this kind of delays negotiations and friction isn't unexpected at all in huge projects like this no it was once the project actually got underway and the concepts and plans gave way to actual contracts and deadlines that this story really started to turn into a comedy of errors and I'll tell you exactly why that is after this are you a nervous flyer or just feel uncomfortable when you have to board an aircraft and have no one to ask questions to I know that there are a lot of you out there so I decided to do something about it I have just released a new web-based application specifically made for you nervous flyers and Aviation enthusiasts out there in the app we have a dpt4 powered AI pilot named Aidan who is specifically trained to answer any of the questions that you might have in the news section you will get the latest Aviation news and Adam will be able to summarize and answer questions about the Articles as well as translate them into any language if you're going flying within the next 36 hours the app will be able to tell you if the flight will be turbulent when that turbulent might come and also it will be able to show you the route you can then ask Aiden about the flight the aircraft that you will fly on and what to do when you reach your destination the app is available right now and there is no need to download it just go to app.mentorpilot.com and create a username now I hope it helps enjoy when the construction of the new airport began in September of 2016 Target opening date was the end of October 2011. as part of that process the old and iconic but small Temple of airport closed in 2008 leaving just teargal and chernfeld to cater for all of the flying needs of the berliners now schoenfeld's second Runway was closed to make way for a new highway that would create access to the new terminal building this main building of the new airport would be constructed in a u-shape and incorporate two terminals aptly named Terminal 1 and 2. the smaller Terminal 2 would eventually handle low-cost carriers who until the new airport was fully completed would continue to be using the old Jennifer terminal which was strangely named terminal 5. the reason it wasn't simply called Terminal 3 was because there were plans to build two other future terminals in an expansion area between the two runways eventually though Terminal 5 would be closed completely but only after a very expensive remodeling of it now connectivity to the new terminals was a big priority during the planning phase a new Rail Link would be built to connect to the airport with downtown Berlin creating a journey time of only around 30 minutes or so and unlike the rest of the airport this railway station and connections was actually completed right on time in October 2011. but no passengers would be able to use this brand new station for another nine years now obviously an opening date of something as huge as a new big airport Hub will trigger a lot of the affected companies to make their own plans in connection to it and I'm not talking about just the railway companies here no the same is of course also true for dozens of ground handling and other businesses like coffee shops duty-free shops rental car companies and many many more whose equipment can't simply just make a quick positioning flight from one airport to the other making a move like this can be a really expensive process which has to be planned and managed many months or even years in advance to avoid an unnecessary changeover costs and that's also including things like hiring and possibly also firing stuff won the planned October 2011 opening date came and went the airport authorities instead set their targets to modest delay to June 2012 instead but then when it became clear that this wouldn't happen either the German Railway and most of those other companies started to sue to get some type of compensation for the huge cost that they had and was continuously incurring obviously these companies had invested a lot of their own money into the move and now they had to just sit on their hands and wait while the airport was still being worked on and it turned out that this delay was only the beginning because there wasn't only one problem facing this new airport first the authorities had to deal with paying for the sound proofing for homes and businesses around the new airport area now that might sound obvious but one factor that the airport planners hadn't thought of was that they would also have to compensate people for improving the ventilation of their homes because it turns out that the airport noise wouldn't allow for the residents to Simply open their Windows these compensations and modifications took a lot of time to resolve but at least they didn't slow down the actual construction of the airport however the most embarrassing most time consuming and most expensive issues with this airport would turn out to involve actual design faults and glaring manufactural defects for example the main wall of the new terminal building was facing west which is where most of the rain and wind would be coming from it had been fitted with air vents on that side which were consistently letting rain water through into the building causing damages another costly error had to do with the cooling pipes with a total length of 60 kilometers or about 37 miles that turned out to have been fitted without thermal insulation and by the time that this problem was discovered replacing those pipes meant demolishing several walls to get access to them then there were some minor issues that were time consuming to fix involving some faulty pipes and electrical wiring but probably the most outrageous problem involved the fire suppression system for the entire terminal building not only did problems with wiring mean that the various alarms warning and suppression systems didn't really work properly but the design of the entire system was well questionable to say the least to make sure that the roof of the terminal looked pretty uncluttered and clean the fire suppression system had been designed to channel potential fire smoke downwards using pumps designed to direct it to below the floor of the terminal building where it would be pumped out not surprisingly that didn't work because hot smoke has a tendency to always rise upwards no matter how much you try to pump it in another Direction incredibly but at this point maybe not surprisingly it would later be revealed that the engineer who had designed this system wasn't actually an engineer he was an engineering drothman that means someone who's designing engineering drawings but because of this the entire ventilation system had to be redesigned with roof chimneys instead but only after all of its wiring and control systems were redone from scratch this ended up costing millions and taking years to do but we're not done yet what made this already embarrassing situation even worse was that it was basically kept secret until the very last minute remember the airport was expected to open in the summer of 2012 and the world only found out about this debacle and that the airport definitely wouldn't open less than a month before the new planned inauguration this included not telling the airlines or anyone else not even the people that were planning to start working at this new airport this was well insane remember the plan was that Diego Airport the only other commercial airport in Berlin would close at the same time as the New Berlin Brandenburg airport would open this meant that thousands of people and millions of Euros worth of equipment was planned to be transferred from one airport to the other overnight for the big opening that had taken incredible amount of organization and planning which now turned out to be completely worthless people who have been hired or had their contracts terminated in anticipation of the original deadline suddenly found themselves and all of their plans in limbo with no new plan opening inside in terms of managing expectations things just doesn't get any worse than this now to add hilarious insult to injury it later emerged at the airport management had hoped to get around the debacle of the fire suppression system and open for business on time by hiring 800 people armed with high-vis jackets and mobile phones who would work as fire spotters calling for help if they spotted any smoke that was obviously an absolutely not going to happen but apparently the airport management at the time thought that it was a realistic backup solution and that's why they had played down the prospect of more delays before the news broke I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when the airport management pitched this idea yeah so the fire suppression system in the terminal doesn't really work but but we've got class on telega who's going to take care of that for us what this Fiasco led to a lot of resignations as it frankly should but it also had an eye-watering effect on the budget when construction of this project began the budget was 2.83 billion euros which is just over 3 billion dollars but by 2012 this had ballooned to 4.5 billion euros and eventually the initial cost would nearly quadruple to over 10 billion euros or 11 billion dollars because you have to remember that as time went by the completed or nearly completed buildings needed Millions every year just in maintenance even though there were no passengers going through them many years billions of euros and some changes of management later Berlin Brandenburg airport officially opened on the 31st of October 2020 and in 2020 in case you don't remember demand for air travel wasn't that high but that's probably the only thing in this story that we can't really fault the airport planners for just to top off this debacle the airport had planned to have two aircraft landing at the same time on each Runway to inaugurate the new airport but that didn't happen there are very strict visibility minimums for that type of operation and the weather simply didn't cooperate on the opening day less surprisingly the airport's second Runway then closed less than a month later because of the collapse in air travel demand that came with the pandemic but according to some sources the biggest problem with Berlin's new airport is that there might not have been a need for it in the first place or at least not the way that it was designed the original goal that the entire planning of the airport depends on was to create a big International Airport Hub that passengers would use to transfer between shorter feeder and international long-haul flights much of the airport's infrastructure including its shops and other facilities were designed with these type of passing passengers in mind but remember this plan was made back in the late 1990s when many believe that the Hub and spoke Airline operating model was going to be the way forward of the airline business this was the same premise that caused Airbus to actually design the Airbus A380 but as as I've explained in some of my previous videos much of the airline world has instead for quite some time now been moving away from the Hub and spoke towards the point-to-point model instead making large centralized hubs mostly obsolete to succeed as a big Hub Berlin would need to attract a lot of the major carriers in and especially from outside of Europe this means that it has to compete with already existing European super airports like Paris London and even Frankfurt in Germany itself years before the airport's completion its potential to become profitable given the new shape of Aviation seemed questionable to say the least however there might still be a silver lining for Brandenburg airport after all of this because there are some indications that the rising demand for air travel is already making airport slots at the big hubs hard to come by and that could really be some good news another indication of that happening is the growth of our aircraft who tend to seat more and more passengers which each new generation of them so maybe just maybe this new big airport Hub in the heart of Europe could eventually become successful after all in spite of its truly ridiculous creation story but I have to say on a personal note that I traveled from Brandenburg myself last month and I was frankly shocked by how badly thought through the airport was even though it was brand new just take the fact that there was no taxi or car stops at Terminal 2 at all meaning that all passengers had to get off at Terminal 1 and then walk outside in the rain across a what looked like a parking lot for a couple of hundred meters to reach terminal 2 and that didn't look like a temporary solution it just looked like someone has forgotten about that and once we were in Terminal 2 None of the self-service check-in desk worked either leading to huge cues to the one manned desk that they had so I guess that the design chaos of Brandenburg airport is still not completely over now check out this video next door enjoy this playlist if you want to support my work I would love to have you on one of my patreon crew Hangouts any support is really and truly appreciated have an absolutely fantastic day and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Mentour Now!

Views: 537,375

Keywords: mentour now, German efficiency, mentour pilot, berlin, germany, brandenburg, tegel, schonefeld, world war 2, ww2, world war, crazy, fire, fire suppression, frankfurt

Id: HjsLPNvMKxo

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2023