Why Berlin’s new airport keeps missing its opening date

By L.R.S. | BERLIN

GERMANS are not renowned for their sense of humour, but that has not prevented one of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects from becoming a joke. Originally set to open in October 2011 at a total cost of €2bn ($2.15bn), Berlin Brandenburg Airport is still lying unused in the countryside south-east of the capital. Projected construction costs have risen to more than €6bn. The company that runs the airport, which is owned by the city of Berlin, Brandenburg state and the federal government, spends €17m each month in maintenance for the empty terminal building, while forgoing some €13m in rental income. Nobody was surprised when the airport’s boss announced last weekend that it would miss yet another deadline—its sixth so far. The airport is now scheduled to begin operating in 2018. Why has Germany been unable to get Berlin Brandenburg Airport off the ground?

The official reason for the current hold-up is prosaic. More than a thousand automatic doors in the terminal building need to be rejigged to ensure that they close properly in the event of a fire. Opening the airport before this is done is deemed too dangerous by the airport's executives. But the door debacle is only the latest in a never-ending list of construction faults: car parks that began to crumble weeks after they had been completed, missing check-in counters and luggage conveyor belts, faulty fire-safety walls between the airport and the railway station that serves it, pipes and cables so ill-fitted as to be useless. Whenever a new problem became known, the opening date had to be moved back.