Each morning at about 3am, a train glides into the station below Berlin’s new airport – then heads out again five minutes later. The ghost train trips are not to transport passengers, but to prevent fungus growing on the walls.
“The journeys ensure a regular air exchange and that the technical equipment is kept in working order,” said Burkhard Ahlert, spokesman for Berlin’s S-Bahn train company. “We were ready to go for the original opening date, six years ago.”
The darkened train station – like the rest of the ghostly Berlin Brandenburg International Airport (BER) above it – was supposed to go into service in 2010. Weeks before the opening, everything was cancelled.
BER was refused a fire certificate after it emerged that the ventilation system had neither been built to plan nor was it fit for purpose. Like an airline disaster movie, one crisis followed another.
Since then four opening dates have come and gone. Every day the airport remains closed costs €1.3 million in upkeep. New problems in the last days – 1,200 automatic doors that won’t open, sprinklers that don’t sprinkle – mean the fifth opening date in 2017 won’t happen either. BER might open next year, but Berliners aren’t holding their breath.
Makes mockery of German efficiency
Some 55 years ago East German leader Walter Ulbricht insisted that “no one intends building a wall” in Berlin, only to do just that two months later. Today a postcard popular with Berlin tourists proclaims: “No one intends opening an airport.”
On Monday, chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman weighed into the debate, saying the never-ending BER farce was a poor advertisement for Berlin and Germany.
The new airport makes a mockery of German efficiency in general and public infrastructure projects in particular. For many Berliners, far worse than the loss of face and waste of their tax money is the lack of political responsibility. Though they sit on the airport planning board, state politicians in Berlin and the neighbouring state of Brandenburg said on Monday they were shocked – shocked – to learn of the latest delay.
“We’re not planning a moon landing,” groaned Dietmar Woidke, state premier of Brandenburg.
True: while the moon landing took eight years from president Kennedy’s speech to Neil Armstrong’s one small step, Berlin’s new airport has been in planning for 20 years while the diggers broke ground in September 2006.
A decade later BER is about twice over budget at €5.4 billion, depending how you count; another €2 billion is likely to be needed to finish the job.
Berlin’s strength doesn’t lie in opening airports, but in closing them. It’s eight years since the city government closed Tempelhof, the Nazi-era structure dubbed by British architect Norman Foster “the mother of all airports”.
Tegel airport is doomed
The Tempelhof airfield – slightly larger than New York’s Central Park – has found a new life as an improvised green lung. But Tempelhof airport itself – one of the world’s largest buildings – stands empty. An enviable city centre air connection has been lost forever.
A similar fate awaits Berlin’s western airport, Tegel. Opened in 1948 and just 8km outside town, Tegel airport is also doomed. Pointing to a court order, local politicians say they are obliged to close Tegel six months after BER’s doors open. But even before the doors open – all 1,200 need to be rewired – BER is already too small to handle the city’s air traffic.
That’s not the only aviation risk facing the city. Last November, a private plane crashed on the runway of Berlin Schönefeld airport, adjacent to BER, blocking the runway for 90 minutes and forcing diversion of planes to Leipzig and Dresden. Once Tegel closes, another such accident – or a terrorist attack – at BER would mean state politicians had succeeded where Stalin failed: in blocking access to Berlin from the air.
The ongoing uncertainty over BER’s opening date has been a boost to the “Berlin Needs Tegel” campaign, devised by the liberal opposition Free Democrats and now backed by Ryanair.
“We support the idea that Berlin, like London or Paris, has several working airports,” said Kenny Jacobs, Ryanair’s marketing chief.
The Irish airline doesn’t even fly to Tegel – it prefers Schönefeld across town. But Ryanair likes to keep its options open, like its airports.
