Berlin-Brandenburg Airport in Germany appeared abandoned prior to its long-overdue opening in 2020. Plans for the airport were first put together in 1996 and in 2011, when it seemed to finally be ready to open its doors to passengers from around the world, hundreds of thousands of major structural issues were found.
Following the bombshell discoveries, the opening of the airport was delayed, with calls from some for the entire facility to be scrapped and a new plan developed. However, with billions of euros already ploughed into the project, it was decided it was simply too costly to mothball. According to The B1M, the shoddiness of the project was evident all over the site. One example of the incompetent construction was 170,000km of incorrectly installed wiring.
Following the revelations about the poor workmanship at the airport, Meinhard von Gerkan was replaced as the man charged with delivering it.
He was replaced with Hartmut Mehdorn, the CEO of Germany’s biggest railway company. Despite optimism over his appointment, Mehdorn’s team found that the numbers of technical faults in the airport was actually around 550,000, rather than the initial estimate of 120,000.
As a result of having to fix the botched job, the total cost of the project skyrocketed from £1.68bn to £5.8bn.
Between 2013 and 2019, according to The B1M, the daily train ran from Berlin-Brandenburg to the capital city without any passengers, and airport staff were on-hand to make sure the luggage carousel didn’t seize up or the water go stagnant.
From 2013 to 2019, the airport remained unopened as workers scrambled to get it in the necessary condition to facilitate thousands of passengers a day.
Then, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, the airport was finally ready for take-off. On October 31, 2020 Berlin-Brandenburg opened, 24 years after first being planned.
Despite its rocky beginnings, the site won Airport Innovation Award in 2023, besting rivals Vienna, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. Today, it is one of the first airports in the world to harness the power of AI.
