How Berlin’s Futuristic Airport Became a $6B Embarrassment • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by peterfirefly » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 9:10 PM UTC

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #45

hvs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you build an airport near the city, it becomes impossible to expand. San Diego is a good example of this, a single-runway airport that's surrounded by the bay, I-5, the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, and a residential neighborhood. It's running near capacity and impossible to expand. There's simply nowhere to go.

They can expand into the water, adding an extra East-West strip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Artificial_island_air...

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

#132

Post by wlesieutre » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #127

wlesieutre wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a lot of powerful software for building design these days, Autodesk's Revit suite being the big one. But as in software development, better tools just ends up meaning that clients demand things faster and cheaper, rather than better. There are some classes of problems that it definitely helps solve, like keeping the structural engineer and HVAC engineer from design conflicts where a beam and a duct go through…

AFAIK as long as you're only carrying a couple of 230V lines (3x1.5qmm NYM-J and friends) you're fine to use plastic tubes or tack them onto the walls, but as soon as you're mixing in non-power wiring you're required to lay them in separate tubes.

Commercial construction or residential? Small residential buildings in the US get by with unshielded Romex wiring, but I'm pretty sure NEC doesn't allow it for commercial projects here.

I'm on the lighting side of things, so I'm tangentially familiar with electrical requirements but I don't deal with them regularly.

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

#133

Post by gerbal » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 9:13 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #92

germanier wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that the quality isn't too bad. Sure, the grammar is way off but you can actually understand what they are trying to say.

I find how well that works is directly related to how closely related English is to the language in question. The further you get from its Germanic and Latin roots, the proportionally less sense a rough translation makes. Some of that is figures of speech, some of it is colloquialisms, some of it is just weird grammar. For example, Japanese tends to omit the subject, which is incredibly confusing when directly transl…

Germany newspapers apparently use weird grammar conventions that makes translation engines have fits. Google Translate is pretty good on german conversations, anything the EU publishes, and literature, but is really terrible at newspapers.

The translation of the above article is pretty good because a number of people have looked at it and made corrections, but the average German Newspaper article translation is nearly incomprehensible.

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

#134

Post by detaro » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 9:15 PM UTC

JimboOmega wrote: post #123

jandrese wrote: post #30

This is exactly what you expect to happen when you're redesigning the building in the middle of construction. If the project manager can't say no then it's pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster. On the plus side, it seems like they've finally found someone competent to fix the mess and move the project forward.

What I don't quite get is that the problem keeping things from being fixed seems to be entirely related to the fire system. Meanwhile all the other issues like heavy equipment breaking tiles... none of that seems to be slowing it from opening. So how did all the other systems wind up being more or less ready?

The fire system was the thing that forced them to admit the delays and has gotten the biggest publicity, because failing the fire certification forbids them from doing anything except construction work. I don't think anyone had (or even has now) a clue if the other things actually were completely ready. Stuff like power lines in the wrong cable channels makes one suspect they weren't...

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

#135

Post by wlesieutre » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 9:16 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #129

wlesieutre wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a lot of powerful software for building design these days, Autodesk's Revit suite being the big one. But as in software development, better tools just ends up meaning that clients demand things faster and cheaper, rather than better. There are some classes of problems that it definitely helps solve, like keeping the structural engineer and HVAC engineer from design conflicts where a beam and a duct go through…

But as in software development, better tools just ends up meaning that clients demand things faster and cheaper, rather than better. Exact same thing in the arts field - not all clients of course, and I can't think of a recent equivalent to a fiasco of this scale, but the general trend is that clients feel when the cost of technology goes down so should other costs.

Swear to god, I've had inquiries come in that sat dead for years and suddenly it's "Please revise. I need the updated version tomorrow."

Since email is 1000 times faster than shipping drawings back and forth, that means everything I do takes 1000th the time that it used to. Apparently.

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

#136

Post by MrBuddyCasino » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

Kenji wrote: post #102

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory that is taken out of the drawer in such occasions is that the airport will have "a positive economical impact on the whole region, so the calculation isn't that simple". Sometimes it works, but in most cases it doesn't.

If "the calculation isn't that simple" how come the politicians think they can figure out the solution, but the collective hivemind of demand and offer by literally all participants of the economy cannot?

Economical advancement mean more jobs, more taxes, happier citizens. A privately controlled/financed airport doesn't care about those things, thus the mixed calculation leads to different results for state and private actors. Unfortunately, the numbers projected by the state actors are often unsound.

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

#137

Post by _ak » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 9:25 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #100

_ak wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the proud feeling about Berlin's grandiose track record when it comes to corruption and incompetence in major construction projects.

Aside from the airport, I don't think Berlin is worse than any other major city. There are huge construction debacles for various reasons everywhere.

No, there's been a concentration of construction-related scandals with corruption, bribery, etc. in Berlin over the last 40 to 50 years.

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

#138

Post by brazzy » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 9:50 PM UTC

germanier wrote: post #53

giarc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide an English summary?

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…

> They also suggest that these projects look like a Ponzi scheme: A project's loss is paid by doing even crazier projects.

This seems to me to be the most interesting finding: the company was not doing all this illegal shit in a diabolical scheme to make the owners or management super rich (though they probably got some fat unwarranted bonuses over the years), but in desperate attempts to stave off bankruptcy.

A bit like Nick Leeson's Barings Bank shenanigans, just with less leverage, so it took a whole company to do half the damage a single person could do in finance...

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

#139

Post by unreal37 » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 9:56 PM UTC

I love that there's 150,000 defects, 80,000 of them considered serious.

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

#140

Post by johnbeerboost » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 10:23 PM UTC

kjs3 wrote: post #61

krschultz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it's a PITA when you fly, but how often do you fly? I'd rather the airport be far from downtown than have the approach/departure routes right over populated neighborhoods. That gets really annoying really quickly.

> Honestly it's a PITA when you fly, but how often do you fly? I was a Delta Gold Medallion flyer for years (50k+ miles), and couple of times flirted with Platinum (75k+ miles). So...basically on a flight a couple of times a week, every week. There are large numbers of us. Denver is a pain in the ass.

A couple of times a week? That doesn't really add up. I flew London to San Francisco and back just once a month - not several times a week - for a year and that was 130k miles.