How is it possible that a country such as Germany, famed for its efficiency, world-class engineering, and foresight, could have such an important project as constructing an airport go so wrong so fast?
The idea for the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport was initially spawned in 1991 and was named The Willy Brandt Airport after the then-mayor of West Berlin who championed the reunification of Germany.
It was to be the third busiest airport in Germany, designed by the renowned German architecture firm, GMP. Their design anticipated a flow of over 27 million passengers a year and took fifteen years in the preplanning stage alone. All the nuts and bolts were accounted for, architectural drawings were meticulously drawn up, scrutinized, and continually adjusted to anticipate whatever problems might occur during construction.
So, you would think that with that much foresight, expertise, and attention to all the minute details that nothing could go wrong.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Ghost Airport, as it was soon to be nicknamed, was destined to be the nation’s biggest embarrassment and if the ensuing fiascos were not documented the whole debacle may well have been considered a work of fiction.
Construction started in 2006 with an estimated budget of $2 billion, an opening date set for October 2011. It wasn’t long into the project, as safety inspectors toured the site, that they discovered rudimentary failings in the electrical installations, and soon cracks began to appear, figuratively and literally, wherever they looked.
First, being cautious due to an airport fire in Dusseldorf six years previously that killed 17 people, they ran a fire alarm simulation. The abject failure of such a rudimentary test stunned the inspectors, but the failure was downplayed by the management team who were determined to meet the upcoming opening date, and they came up with a novel idea to meet their deadline of June 2012.
Their recommendation was to hire 800 temporary workers to physically open fire doors and alert each other by mobile phone in the event of a fire actually breaking out. Unsurprisingly, this ludicrous plan was not even considered for a moment and the opening date was not met.
The team of inspectors continued to investigate, digging deeper to expose whatever faults may be lurking behind closed walls. They found faulty wiring and such a plethora of basic construction mistakes that they had to turn to the Chief engineer, Alfredo di Mauro, to explain the dire situation.
It seemed, astoundingly upon further inspection, that di Mauro was not actually a chief planner but only an apprentice drafter, the credentials on his business card a typing error which he neglected to correct.
The cost of his errors, oversights, and lack of experience cost millions of dollars to rectify.
To compound the problems even further the construction company went bankrupt. Then even more installed systems failed, both catastrophically and comically, with some lights unable to be switched off, while others were unable to be switched on.
Not surprisingly, opening dates suffered further setbacks, with new architecture and engineering firms contracted to rework, well, everything. They were faced with a monumental task, stuck with remodeling an infrastructure that was quickly becoming outdated and not fit for the new generation of travelers
Things got even worse as these construction companies themselves went bankrupt, leaving a confusing array of half-finished jobs from one end of the airport to the other, and in the ensuing melee architects and planners were either quitting, going under, or being fired and so, unsurprisingly, the project simply petered off to a shuddering stop.
A skeleton crew of hundreds of maintenance workers and security staff remained on-site with an estimated cost of about $12 million a month.
Finally, after changing the outdated 750 flight monitors, correcting the inadequate fire doors and haphazard lighting failures as well as a myriad of other design and construction flaws, as well as missing six previous opening dates, the doors were finally opened in October 2020.
By this time the budget had more than tripled to $7.3 billion with allegations of corruption and sheer incompetence swirling around the ill-fated project.
There can be no doubt that this fiasco damaged Germany’s reputation for efficiency, and to this day many consider the “Ghost Airport” to be a financial black hole that will never recoup the time, effort, and money sunk into it.