10 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020
NBERLIN — Styled like a boarding
card, Gregor Gysi’s invitation to the
opening party of the “most modern
airport in Europe” arrived in the mail.
There would be 10,000 guests and a red
carpet landing by Chancellor Angela
Merkel on the runway. Mr. Gysi couldn’t
wait.
Eight years later, Mr. Gysi, a law-
maker and native Berliner, is still wait-
ing.
Berlin-Brandenburg Willy Brandt
Airport, conceived 30 years ago in the
giddy aftermath of German reunifica-
tion as a symbol of freedom and moder-
nity, has instead become the butt of
jokes. When the opening on Mr. Gysi’s
invitation was abruptly scrapped, it
was neither the first postponement nor
the last for a project delayed by a seem-
ingly endless succession of problems.
With the latest opening date now
scheduled for Oct. 31, invitations have
again gone out. This time there is no
party (“It felt wrong,” the airport’s
public relations manager said), just an
opening — fingers crossed.
“I’m the only one who always knew
this airport would open in the fall,” said
Mr. Gysi. “I just didn’t know which
year!”
The litany of engineering blunders,
corruption scandals and lawsuits that
have plagued what was once Europe’s
biggest building site have chipped away
at the story Germany likes to tell about
itself as a model of efficiency and good
government.
Six opening dates have come and
gone.
Miles of cables were incorrectly
installed. Firewalls turned out to be just
walls. Escalators came up short.
Screens had to be replaced, having
reached the end of their lives.
Under construction for 14 years, the
airport is nine years past its original
opening date and more than $4 billion
over budget. Every month, it costs
several million dollars just to keep the
unused airport running.
Airport staff are paid to flush all the
toilets to keep the plumbing working.
Ghost trains run to the ghost terminal
at night to stop the tunnels from mold-
ing. Cleaners clean the unused rooms of
the four-star airport hotel.
With so many costly setbacks, T-
shirts spotted in the city offer this ad-
vice: “Let’s just move the city of Berlin
to a functioning airport.”
But this time, insists Engelbert Lütke
Daldrup, the airport’s chief executive,
everything is functioning. Perhaps the
biggest incentive to make sure the
airport opens, he said, is not to be
“laughed at” anymore.
“We German engineers are morti-
fied,” said Mr. Lütke Daldrup, a trained
engineer and longtime public official
who was called in to save the project in
- “Germany is known for its engi-
neering competence. We think of our-
selves as punctual, efficient and compe-
tent. This was embarrassing for Berlin
and for Germany as a whole.”
Even Ms. Merkel has publicly aired
her exasperation: “The very Chinese
with whom we have government con-
sultations are asking themselves, ‘what
on earth is going on in Berlin that they
can’t even build an airport with two
runways’,” she said two years ago.
With its doors finally about to open,
the airport already has the whiff of
another era, like a giant movie set
created for a period drama set in the
1990s.
If it looks vintage — light walnut
paneling on check-in counters and
chocolate-colored suede on seats by the
gates — it’s because it is vintage.
The conspicuously small flight infor-
mation screens were “cutting edge” a
decade ago, said Patrick Muller, the
operations chief.
Self check-in and cellphone charging
stations did not exist when the airport
plans were drawn up, so they are being
added.
Hovering below the ceiling in the
check-in hall is a giant red sculpture of
a flying carpet — testimony, some
snicker, to the fairy-tale approach to big
infrastructure projects in a city that
defies the German stereotype of punc-
tuality, order and planning.
“This airport is an allegory for Berlin
itself,” said John C. Kornblum, a former
United States ambassador to Germany,
who has lived in the city on and off
since the 1960s. “It’s charming, irrever-
ent, eccentric — and utterly dysfunc-
tional.”
Chronically indebted and reliant on
subsidies from richer states, Berlin is “a
sort of failed state” at the heart of Ger-
many, Mr. Kornblum said.
In recent years, Germany’s capital
has amused and exasperated the coun-
try in equal measure, with headlines
about regular prison breaks and a
famously unresponsive bureaucracy, at
least by German standards.
It can take up to 38 days to issue a
death certificate, Die Zeit reported in
an article about Berlin entitled “In love
with failure.” The developers of soft-
ware used in the city’s registry offices
claim it works everywhere else, just not
in Berlin.
Berlin’s reputation as “poor but sexy,”
in the words of one former mayor, is a
legacy of the Cold War, when East
Berlin was run by Communists and
West Berlin was a heavily subsidized
capitalist outpost.
Starting with the Berlin airlift during
the Soviet blockade in 1948, airports
had a special significance in the city for
generations: They represented freedom
to West Berliners surrounded by the
Communist East, and freedom to east-
erners once the Berlin Wall came down.
A state-of-the-art airport worthy of
the reunited capital became a shared
dream after reunification — and more
recently a matter of real urgency as the
city’s existing airports were over-
whelmed by rising passenger numbers.
But just picking a location took half a
decade — and was arguably the first
blunder: Instead of an abandonedairfield in a remote area south of Berlin,
politicians opted for a more densely
populated spot closer to the city, lead-
ing to premium land prices and law-
suits from residents living under the
flight path.
To minimize noise, pilots flying from
the southerly runway will be required
to make a complex 145-degree turn on
takeoff, which the national air traffic
control association describes as “de-
manding” and pilots have dubbed “the
vomit curve.”
The list of stumbles has only grown.
The foundations of the terminal were
already laid when it emerged that the
star architect hired for the project,
Meinhard von Gerkan, had designed
the airport without a proper duty-freearea — a vital source of revenue —
because he had no time for the “mall-
ifiction” of airports.
Plans had to be adjusted in a panic.
Then, a month before the scheduled
2012 opening — tickets had already
been sold, and taxis had been practic-
ing drop-off and pickup — it was re-
vealed that hundreds of fire safety
doors and a giant smoke extraction
system (“the monster”) in the base-
ment did not work.
When management proposed to hire
“human fire alarms,” the building in-
spector told them they were insane.
To avoid another last-minute disaster
this year, the airport has run dress
rehearsals for months. Thousands of
volunteers pose as passengers, testing
the airport staff on everything fromcheck-in to crisis response.
On a recent morning, the terminal
was buzzing with yellow-vested volun-
teers dragging suitcases through secu-
rity. One pretend-passenger had lost
her bag, another her child. A third had
been instructed she was a pickpocket.
“If the police stop you, do cooperate but
do not admit the theft,” her script said.
Most extras were Berliners curious
to see an airport that in some cases had
been talked about for longer than they
had been alive. Susanne Wendt, a 33-
year-old bank employee, said wryly
that she had signed up “to see the air-
port at least once before it fails to open
again.”
Mr. Lütke Daldrup dismisses such
doubts. It may no longer be Europe’s
most modern airport, he conceded, but
“it’s the safest airport in the world.”
“Every screw in the building has
been scrutinized,” he said.
Whether anyone will actually be
flying is another question.
Having missed out on the travel
boom of the past two decades, Berlin’s
new airport now opens in the middle of
a pandemic.
“The ultimate irony is that after all
this, after 30 years, hardly anyone is
flying,” Mr. Kornblum said. At least, he
added, “social distancing will be easy.”BERLIN DISPATCHAn Airport So Slow to Open, It’s Now Passé
Berlin’s new airport, which is set to
open Oct. 31, nine years late and
more than $4 billion over budget. Self
check-in and cellphone charging sta-
tions did not exist when plans were
drawn up, so they are being added.PHOTOGRAPHS BY MUSTAFAH ABDULAZIZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAn unfinished terminal, left, and a plaza at Berlin-Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport. Design blunders, lawsuits and scandals have made it the butt of jokes.
“This airport is an allegory for Berlin itself,” said John C. Kornblum, a former U.S. ambassador. “It’s charming, irreverent, eccentric — and utterly dysfunctional.”Christopher F. Schuetze contributed re-
porting.
By KATRIN BENNHOLD.