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How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

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Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#71

Post by germanier »

protomyth wrote: post #70
germanier wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try but don't hold me accountable for any inaccuracies. At the moment three public prosecutors independently investigate that companies practices which is rare in Germany: 1) A gigantic adventure park in Poland which was never supposed to be built 2) A cartel which allowed them to build two power plants 3) Falsification of balance sheets. Imtech is responsible for parts of the airport's construction – including the…

"Imtech send fraudulent invoices they knew nobody would double-check. This is a practice that seems really common with such projects." Yeah, this is a bit too typical and happens in the USA also. If you ever have to deal with building something, check every invoice as if it was from Snidely Whiplash.

The article specially mentions a one-page invoice with items like "overhead costs" and "disturbances while building" amounting to millions – billed at a time where they still had 5000 other invoices to check.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#72

Post by Kliment »

netcan wrote: post #68

Why do airports always need to be so ambitious? Usually the simple airports are best anyway.

The worst thing about BER is that it's designed to replace Tegel, which is easily the most sensibly built major airport in Germany. Space-efficient, cheap to operate, high-throughput, built very quickly with limited resources to solve a specific problem.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#73

Post by this_user »

germanier wrote: post #21
masklinn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuttgart 21 is mentioned in the article, as well as an unnamed concert hall in Hamburg.

The concert hall they refer to is the Elbphilharmonie which tripled its costs and construction time.

Costs for the tax payer are actually more than seven times (789M EUR) the original estimate at the time construction began (114M EUR in 2007). The initial estimate in 2005 was even lower, foreseeing costs of below 100M for the tax payer with donations supposed to cover the difference.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#74

Post by detaro »

troymc wrote: post #47
therobot24 wrote: post #6

> "Professor, let me understand this," Loge said. "You are talking about having 800 people wearing orange vests, sitting on camping stools, holding thermoses filled with coffee, and shouting into their cell phones, 'Open the fire door'?" Loge refused the airport an operating license. Schwarz stood up and walked out without another word. Easily the best part of the article.

I got a good chuckle out of the sentence: "Then they turned to the fire prevention system. Smoke now channels upward through chimneys, in accordance with the laws of physics."

Yeah, some politician got some "duh, stupid engineers" points out of that sentence. Completely ignoring the fact that the original design also pulled smoke down and was considered to be fine. Since these systems are active and suck the smoke out up or down doesn't matter all that much.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#76

Post by x0rg »

philippnagel wrote: post #60
x0rg wrote: post #56

This is what happens with many software projects following crazy customers and waterfall approaches. Clearly we never speak about 6 billion, but hey, shit happens...

Can you develop a big infrastructure project using agile methodologies?

I don't know anything about building an airport, but I guess you could try something. We tried to compare software to buildings for many years, maybe in a case like this the learnings from failing software projects can be somehow useful.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#77

Post by detaro »

ghshephard wrote: post #26

I realize that higher standards of fire and other safety measures make these systems more complicated, but you would think that with all the technology we have today for planning, engineering, communication, documentation, modeling and simulation - that these types of fiascos would become rarer and rarer. I wonder if anyone has looked at large scale projects like these over the last 100 years and determined what impl…

From what I've heard from the official inquiry into it the fire system design was fine for the original plan. But then they pushed massive changes (original design had 2 stories of arrivals area below 2 stories of departure areas (or the other way round, not sure), they then changed that to a sandwich of arrival/departure/arrival/departure), and as the article notes didn't give time to let the architects actually do a redesign of all components. From that point on no full plan existed and people drafted up local redesigns as they became necessary, often not talking enough to other groups or missing the entire picture.

IMHO it is a great example for structural failure of the organisation running it, being set up in a way that it couldn't properly communicate or force it's leadership to deal with problems. There even are reports that banks that had been asked to provide guarantees declined to do so after reviewing the management structure, because they thought it would be unable to react to problems properly.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#78

Post by lotharbot »

hvs wrote: post #7
coldcode wrote: post #2

Building an airport always is. Often it takes more money and a few decades to appreciate it. D/FW airport was a nightmare when it was built but it's pretty nice today. Denver's airport had tons of issues as well. Then again this seems on a much higher level of disaster, but should be familiar to anyone building large government software systems.

Denver still has the issue that it's a 20 mile drive from downtown out of some misguided belief that the city was just going to instantly grow out to it.

DIA was built far out specifically for noise and expansion -- with the understanding/hope that the city would never get particularly close to it.

The big mistake was not connecting it to the city's light rail sooner.

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#79

Post by schoen »

When I last visited Berlin, I heard a joke about the airport's problems that I thought was very funny:

"Niemand hat die Absicht, einen Flughafen zu errichten!"

('Nobody has the intention to build an airport!')

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall#Construction_begin...

Re: How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment

#80

Post by allendoerfer »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #4

"At the very moment Merkel and her allies are hectoring the Greeks about their profligacy, the airport’s cost, borne by taxpayers, has tripled to €5.4 billion." So, which country does Germany want to borrow money from in order to cover the wasteful spending?

Well, Germany does not need to, as it has a balanced budget:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/german-government-achieves-balan...

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