Why Berlin Built a $7BN Empty Airport

this brand new international airport has 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 but with no suitcases in sight just to stop them from seizing up and the boards that should be displaying departing and arriving flights have had to be replaced they're already worn out despite not ever showing a single flight trip it's 2019 and this

is Europe's most disastrous and controversial airports welcome to Brandenburg Berlin a place that took three decades to [Music] build hello from one of Europe's most controversial airports this place has been in development since the 199 s it took 14 years to build and its budget sort over 7 billion welcome to Brandenburg airport this place has now been open for 5 years and is a thriving bit of Aviation infrastructure you could walk off a plane through any terminal and you'd have no idea of the turmoil of its construction or the ghost airport that it was just

a few years ago but the story of how it got to this stage is far from simple first conceived when the Wall came down in 1989 the airport was supposed to be a symbol of a newly unified Berlin instead it's become a symbol of modern Germany's over bureaucratization and mismanagement more than half a million fults were found back when it was supposed to be opened in 2012 including a fire safety system that didn't work and more than 170,000 km of cable that had to be reinstalled but what's often forgotten is that this disaster actually started

out with an incredibly admirable goal first off you have to understand the power of the airplane as both a remarkable piece of engineering and a symbol for East biners the idea of flying West All Around the Globe was nothing more than a fantasy until thousands and thousands of West Germans come to make the point that the wall has suddenly become irrelevant after the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany the country had new problems to deal with namely a population that had just doubled what was once two cities became one that meant

merging two disperate economies two vastly different infrastructure systems two governments and two cultures many East biners lost their jobs while many West biners viewed their counterparts as economic burdens there was massive social division the new unified Berlin wants to become a hub for international travel but its three airports were outdated and not able to handle the number of people that then lived in the city there were two for the former West Berlin over here at tagel and templehof and one for the east at shenfeld running all of these smaller outdated airports was pretty inefficient so

it was decided that a new worldclass international Hub would be constructed comparable to those in Frankfurt and Munich it would announce Berlin as a new power in Europe and as Germany's renewed Capital but perhaps most importantly it would symbolize the reunification ation of the country Berlin needed to be bound together and this airport would do it now7 billion is no small amount of money and the accountants keeping tabs on costs would have had to be Raaz a sharp but even if your budget is a tou smaller than several billion working with numbers can make the

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you may be whether you're wandering through the trend streets of Berlin or 35,000 ft in the air to try everything brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days visit brilliant i.org theeb 1M scan the QR code on screen or click the link in the description you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription but for now let's get back to 1996 this was the first sign that things would not go entirely smoothly for Brandenburg airports it took them 6 years to decide on a site and after all that time they ended up

choosing here right next to the existing shanfeld airports it wasn't until 2004 that this new airport was finally approved the goal was to create a state-of-the-art new Hub that could handle up to 27 million passengers a year with room for expansion but further delays me the 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 delus 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 different sections they did that and attempt to get lower prices but what they ended up creating was a vastly complicated system with many heads that was incredibly difficult to oversee Mard Von geran was brought on board to be the Chief Architect he had designed Berlin landmarks like the Central Railway Station and already had one airport under his belts over at Tagle he would essentially be replacing himself conflicts between Von gkin and the politicians in charge came about almost

immediately the details of which were handly published in Von gerkins teor book in which he blamed everyone else for the airport's delays vonin 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 whiskey like a b so he designed his airports to have as few shops as possible but when the airport company eventually realized this they insisted on adding new floors just for shopping after all they expected to make up to 50% of their revenue from retail it's safe to

say that Von gin wasn't pleased Berlin's then mayor CLA warit insisted that departure Gates accommodate giant Airbus A380 aircraft aircraft that were no longer in production by the time the airport opened oh on the flip side they didn't have any Gates designed for the lowcost flight Revolution that was suddenly taking over Europe This Again necessitated a last minute redesign as they only had the much bigger expensive jet Bridges all of 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 date loomed over them they had already pushed it back by a year invitations have been sent out and the Press was waiting they really couldn't delay again so these issues were ignored until a few weeks before the grand opening an inspector found the airport's entire fire safety system to be completely faulty there was officially no way this airport could function and the opening was cancelled embarrassing both Berlin and Germany as a whole further investigations revealed major structure and Technical problems including more than 120,000 defects one of which

being more than 170,000 kmet of incorrectly installed cable all at once the astonishing scale of the new Airport's problems became horribly public vonin was fired and following his departure harur meron was brought in to manage the construction of the airport as the former CEO of Germany's biggest Railway company meor promised to finally deliver this project he carried out his own investigation into the airport and if you thought 120,000 defects was bad you haven't seen anything yet he found an incredible 550,000 faults the budget ballooned from2 billion to over7 billion e and it was at this

point that many called for the whole thing to be scrapped for the airport projects to be started again from scratch but the plane had well than truly left the gate far too much money had been spent already for the project to simply be abandoned the years rolled by and more Target dates were missed the airport didn't open in 2013 2014 or 2017 which brings us back to 2019 where the airport sat unused and empty waiting for planes that it seemed would never land so 2020 wasn't a great year for the aviation industry the pandemic was

a once in the generation event international travel was banned pretty much overnight it was the absolute worst possible time to open an airports after nearly a decade of delays Berlin brandenberg airports finally opened on Halloween October 31st 2020 unfortunately the airport's capacity was already insufficient for the number of passengers that were expected to use it in an ordinary year that would be a disaster but thanks to the pandemic and the far far fewer passengers Bing was receiving for once Brandenburg airport had ample time to adjust and avoid any major operational chaos technical glitches were fixed

quietly and Mass public scrutiny was avoided this was kind of a soft opening 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 while brandenberg continues to have its challenges postco its operation has been relatively smooth the story of its construction is yet another reminder that major infrastructure projects are often built for future Generations not for the ones building them today Berlin Brandenburg is thriving it recently won the

airport Innovation award in 2023 beating out Rivals Vienna Frankfurt and Amsterdam and an audit by Sky tracks awarded it four stars just this year for its efficiency and service quality on top of that it's now one of the first airports in the world to use AI in its operations for analysis of aircraft handling in real time the 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'll now be enjoyed by Generations who never saw the wall

intact living in the fully unified City their parents had always dreamed of it may have taken a long time to get there but Berlin's newest airports has officially taken flights this video was sponsored by brilliant you can learn more about that at the link below don't forget that we're inspiring the next generation of Builders through our investment into brick borrow a fantastic Lego sub subscription service you can learn more and get started today over at brick.com and as always guys if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the definitive video channel

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