Recently, the new airport Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport in the German capital Berlin officially went into operation.
The construction of this airport, known as “Germany’s Largest Unfinished Project”, has been delayed repeatedly, nine years later than the original schedule.
What happened to made in Germany?
Germany unfinished airport
germany unfinished airport Large airports are standard equipment in large cities.
Berlin is the capital of Germany and the largest city in Germany, but there are only three small airports with outdated facilities.
In order to meet the development needs of Berlin, Germany decided to build a new airport.
After the reunification of the two Germanys in the 1990s, plans for a new Berlin airport began to be brewed.
The new airport is located in Brandenburg near Berlin. It covers an area of 1,470 hectares, equivalent to the size of 2,000 football fields. It is named after Willy Brandt, the former Chancellor of Germany and the mayor of West Berlin. Brandt) naming.
Berlin unfinished airport Location
Berlin unfinished airport Location In 2006, the new Berlin Airport finally started, and it is scheduled to open on October 30, 2011.
At that time, the completion ceremony was in preparation, and it was planned to invite Prime Minister Merkel to “walk the red carpet” with another 10,000 people participating. The ceremony was grand.
However, the completion plan was suddenly cancelled.
Even Merkel couldn’t help but complain publicly and asked the foreign partners who were consulting the German government:
What’s going on in Berlin? Can’t build an airport with two runways?
Berlin New Airport
The completion time was postponed to the fall of 2012 and then postponed to 2013.
Berlin’s new airport has repeatedly announced a new opening time, and it has slapped itself again and again.
Gradually, the new Berlin Airport became a joke among the local population, and it was even printed on postcards as a self-deprecating Berliner, and it was jokingly called “Germany’s largest unfinished project.”
After skipping tickets six times, the new Berlin Airport was finally officially opened on October 31.
It has been 14 years since the official start of construction.
A pilot at the new airport said that in 2012, she received an invitation to the airport opening ceremony, when her child was still in kindergarten, but now that the child is in middle school, she finally participated in the airport’s opening ceremony .
Unfinished mystery
What caused the new Berlin airport to take 14 years to build?
The airport is a super project, and the preliminary planning and design is extremely important.
However, the planning company responsible for Berlin’s new airport has changed several times. In 2010, the planning office IGK-IGR went bankrupt, which caused the planning plan to be changed and changed again, which seriously affected the construction progress.
Berlin’s new airport plan
The builders of the new airport have not stopped. In 2015, the German subsidiary of Imtech, one of the construction companies, declared bankruptcy, which delayed the progress of the project.
During construction and acceptance, the new airport has continuously exposed various quality problems.
In 2011, during the trial operation of the new airport, volunteers and the media discovered problems such as incorrect door numbers, incorrect cable installation, and too short escalators, and were forced to postpone the opening to 2012.
In 2012, one month before it was opened, inspectors discovered a fire alarm system failure.
In September 2019, 250 “minor problems” were found in the already completed Terminal 2 and some walls and ground had to be demolished and rebuilt.
Berlin’s new airport was caught in the cycle of finding problems—solving problems—discovering problems, which eventually dragged on for 9 years.
Inside the new Berlin Airport
The allegations of corruption cast a shadow over the construction work.
In 2014, Grossman, the former technical director of the new airport, was sentenced for soliciting bribes and fined 200,000 euros. The former head of the drainage system of the new airport and the former construction supervisor of the airport were all involved in bribery cases.
News report
The construction staff were suspected of corruption, which made the construction team not trusted and dragged down the pace of construction.
In addition, cost overruns have also put the construction of the new airport into question.
The budget for the new airport was initially set at 1.7 billion euros, and then increased again, breaking through 6.5 billion euros. The German people began to question whether the new airport should continue to be built and how it should be built.
The German government also lost confidence for a time, and planned to privatize the airport operating company, which ended in failure.
The laughing stock of “Made in Germany”
“Not only Berlin, but the whole of Germany has become a laughing stock.”
Daltrupp, the president of Berlin’s new airport, started with self-deprecating at a press conference.
The New York Times commented that the engineering errors, corruption scandals, and related legal proceedings at Berlin’s new airport have eroded Germany’s self-proclaimed “model of efficiency and good governance”.
Agence France-Presse reported that this project has become a “financial black hole and a national laughing stock,” and it has also broken the outside world’s inherent impression of the “high efficiency” of Germans.
For a long time, German manufacturing has given people the impression of high precision, high efficiency and high quality.
However, the quality problems and corruption scandals of the new Berlin airport have made German manufacturing a laughing stock.
The lessons behind the new Berlin Airport need to be summarized by the Germans themselves.
