The Brandenburg Saga: How Berlin Built a $7BN Empty Airport

Video narrated and hosted by Fred Mills. This video contains paid promotion for Brilliant.

IMAGINE the scene. There's a brand new international airport that's been sitting completely empty for almost a decade.

A 'ghost train' runs once a day from the nearby city to keep the air moving. Its hotel has a skeleton staff dusting empty rooms and turning on taps to keep the water from going stagnant. Its luggage carousels rotate daily with no suitcases in sight, just to stop them from seizing up. The boards that should be displaying departing and arriving flights have to be replaced. They’ve already worn out, without ever showing information for a flight.

It’s 2019 and this is Europe’s most infamous airport megaproject: Berlin Brandenburg.

Fast-forward to today, and the airport has been open five years. It's a thriving piece of aviation infrastructure. You could walk off a plane through any terminal and have no idea of the turmoil of its construction, or of the ghost airport it was just a few years ago. But the story behind how it reached that point is far from simple.

Above: Brandenburg Airpot took nearly 30 years to build. Image courtesy of FBB / Berlin Brandenburg Airport

First conceived when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Brandenburg Airport was supposed to be a symbol of a newly unified Berlin. Instead it became synonymous with bureaucratisation and mismanagement.

More than half a million faults were found back when it was supposed to be opened in 2012, including with a fire safety system that didn’t work and more than 170,000-kilometres of cable that had to be reinstalled.

What’s often forgotten, however, is that this disaster started out with an incredibly admirable goal.

PREFLIGHT: THE WALL COMES DOWN, 1989 - 1996

First off, it's important to understand the power of the airplane as both a remarkable piece of engineering, and as a symbol.

For East Berliners the idea of flying West or around the globe was nothing more than fantasy, until the fall of the Wall. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the country had new problems to face, namely a population that has just doubled.

The Wall came down in 1989 and suddenly Berlin’s population doubled. What was once two cities became one. This meant merging two disparate economies, two vastly different infrastructures, two governments, and two cultures.

Many East Berliners lost their jobs while many West Berliners viewed their counterparts as economic burdens. There was massive social division.

Berlin now also had three airports, although none of them could accommodate this new unified Berlin.

Above: Brandenburg Airpot was built to be a major hub for Europe. Image courtesy of FBB / Berlin Brandenburg Airport

There were two for the former West Berlin at Tegal and Tempelhof and one for the East at Schönefeld.

Running all of these smaller outdated airports was inefficient. So it was decided a new world class international airport would be built comparable to those in Frankfurt and Munich.

It would announce Berlin as a new power in Europe and as Germany’s new capital. Perhaps most importantly, it would symbolise the unification of the country. Berlin needed to be bound together… and this airport would do it.

GROUNDED: WHY BRANDENBURG COULDN'T GET AIRBORNE, 1996 - 2011

The first sign that things would not go so smoothly for Brandenburg Airport: it took six years for them to decide on a site.

And, after all that time, they ended up choosing… right next to the existing Schönefeld airport.

It wasn’t until 2004 that this airport was finally approved. The goal was to create a state-of-the-art facility capable of handling up to 27M passengers annually, with room for expansion.

Further delays meant that construction didn’t start until 2006. Just in time for the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. The global economic downturn made it very difficult to find a contractor to build and fund the airport - so they used public money.

According to Martin Delius, a former Berlin city politician, those in charge decided to break the airport into lots of smaller contracts with different companies and people in charge of those sections.

Above: A shopping floor had to be added later on because of the Architect's hatred for retail. Image courtesy of FBB / Berlin Brandenburg Airport

They did this in an attempt to get lower prices but what they ended up creating was a vastly complicated system with many heads that was difficult to oversee.

Meinhard von Gerkan was brought on to be the chief architect. He had designed Berlin landmarks like the Central Railway Station and already had one airport under his belt: Tegal Airport. He would essentially be replacing himself.

Conflicts between von Gerkan and the politicians in charge came about almost immediately.

The details of which were handily published later in von Gerkan’s “Tell-all” book in which he blamed everybody else for the airport’s delays.

Von Gerkan hated shops. He hated how airports were becoming giant malls. He hated, and this is a quote, passengers in his airport "dragging around unwanted bottles of whisky like a beggar". So he designed his airport to have as few shops as possible.

When the airport company eventually realised this, they insisted on adding new floors purely for shopping. After all, they expected to make up to 50% of their revenue from retail.

It’s safe to say, von Gerkan wasn’t pleased. But a lack of duty free shopping was hardly the only challenge.

Berlin's then-mayor Klaus Wowereit insisted that departure gates accommodate giant Airbus A380 aircraft. Aircraft that were no longer in production by the time the airport opened.

They also didn’t have any gates designed for the low-cost flight revolution that was suddenly taking over Europe. This again necessitated a last minute redesign as they only had the much more expensive "jet bridges".

These constant design changes led to unrealistic deadlines. There was too much to do - and what needed to be done kept getting changed at the last minute.

All the while the 2012 grand opening loomed. They had already pushed the date back a year, invitations had been sent out and the press was waiting. They could not delay again.

TURBULENCE: THE FIRST CRISIS, 2011 - 2012

Just a few weeks before the grand opening, an inspector found much of the airport’s fire safety system to be faulty.

Above: Brandenburg Airpot's original opening had to be cancelled... several times. Image courtesy of FBB / Berlin Brandenburg Airport

There was no way the airport could function and the opening was cancelled, embarrassing Berlin and Germany as a whole.

Further investigations revealed major structural and technical problems including more than 120,000 defects. One of which being that 170,000-kilometres of incorrectly installed cable.

All at once, the astonishing scale of the new airport's problems became horribly public.

DELAYS, DELAYS, DELAYS: ANOTHER DECADE, NO AIRPORT, 2013 - 2019

Meinhard von Gerkan was fired, and following his departure Hartmut Mehdorn was brought in to manage the construction of the airport.

As the former CEO of Germany's biggest railway company, Mehdorn promised to finally deliver this project.

He carried out his own investigation into the airport. If you thought 120,000 defects was bad - Mehdorn found an astonishing 550,000 faults. The budget ballooned from €2BN to over €7BN.

It was at this point that many called for the whole thing to be called off and to start again from scratch. But the plane had well and truly left the gate. Far too much money having been spent already for the project to be simply abandoned.

The years rolled by and more target dates were missed. The airport didn’t open in 2013, 2014, 2017… Which brings us back to 2019, where the airport sat unused and empty. Waiting for planes that, it seemed, would never land.

2020

We all know what happened to the aviation industry in 2020. The pandemic was a once in a lifetime event. International travel was banned pretty much overnight.

This was the absolute worst possible time to open an airport. Well, actually it wasn’t.

Above: Terminal 1 of Brandenburg Airpot. Image courtesy of FBB / Berlin Brandenburg Airport

After nearly a decade of delays Berlin Brandenburg Airport finally opened on Halloween - October 31, 2020. Unfortunately the airport’s capacity was already insufficient for the number of passengers that were expected to use it.

In an ordinary year this would be a disaster. But thanks to the pandemic and the far, far fewer passengers Berlin was receiving, for once Brandenburg Airport had ample time to adjust and avoid major operational chaos.

Technical glitches were fixed quietly and mass public scrutiny was avoided. By the time travel rebounded in 2022 and 2023, Brandenburg had worked through most of its opening-phase issues.

The Berlin Wall stood for three decades. That’s also how long it took for this airport to finally open.

TAKEOFF

While the airport continues to have its challenges, post-covid its operation has been relatively smooth.

The story of its construction is a reminder that major infrastructure projects are often built for future generations, and not for the ones building them.

Above: Brandenburg Airpot is now a thriving aviation hub. Image courtesy of FBB / Berlin Brandenburg Airport

The airport is now thriving. It recently won the Airport Innovation Award in 2023, beating out rivals Vienna, Frankfurt and Amsterdam, and an audit by Skytrax awarded it four-stars just this year for its efficiency and service quality.

On top of that, it is now one of the first airports in the world to use AI in its operations to analyse aircraft handling in real time.

Brandenburg Airport has finally arrived and it’s fulfilling its promise of a united Berlin on the cutting edge.

While its symbolic power may be tarnished, Brandenburg Airport was eventually built. It will now be enjoyed by generations who never saw the wall intact - living in the fully unified city their parents dreamed of.

It may have taken a little longer to get there, but Berlin’s newest airport has officially taken flight.

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Video narrated and hosted by Fred Mills. Additional footage and images courtesy of FBB / Berlin Brandenburg Airport, ABC News, Danny Creek, and DW News.

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