Bye Bye Tegel. Here’s looking at you, BER

As we write this, the very last plane is taking off from Berlin Tegel Airport – an Air France flight to Paris. This is fitting, as the airport was built in 1948 in the French sector of Allied-occupied Berlin, and the first flight into the fledgling airport in the north-west of the city was a French airplane. 

The airport was built in 90 days – an astonishing achievement, which at its height had 19,000 local Germans toiling away to meet the deadline of getting the airport ready for what would be a critical part of the great Berlin Airlift.

In the intervening years, the hexagonal-shaped airport had become much beloved by local Berliners for its ease of access, proximity to gates and short turnaround times. Future flights to and from Berlin will now all be through the new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport BER, which opened for business last week after a delay of nearly a decade.

It is hard to describe the extent of the mismanagement, incompetence, and political and business hubris that led to the disaster that surrounded every aspect of the new airport, including the very decision to locate it where it now is, unmovable for ever more. We have read numerous accounts of the background that led to the catastrophic management of the project, which stumbled from one impossible deadline to the next, compounding error upon error, and swallowing up business, administrative and political reputations along the way.

We have recently listened to the full audiobook Made in Germany – Das Flughafenfiasko BER from Christian Alt and Spiegel Verlag. It’s a well-told tale, with lots of original interviews and recordings from the public domain, and it left us shaking our head in disbelief at the true events in this very modern tale of a large infrastructural project development of such importance to Germany at a local and national level.

It’s hard to understand why Klaus Wowereit, the governing mayor of Berlin at the time, is not sitting behind bars sitting out a lengthy jail sentence for his role in the project, which saw costs spiral from €2bn to €6bn, generously funded by the taxpayer.

It is worth reminding readers that the airport was within weeks of opening in 2012, with heavy pressure coming from the politicians to ensure the opening day was held to, no matter what. Shops and concessionaires had already begun stocking their outlets, the caterers were putting the last touches to the airport’s bars and cafés, the ribbon-cutting ceremony had been set up. Had it not been for a courageous local district administrator in Dahme-Spreewald in Brandenburg, Stefan Loge, who refused to sign off on a safety regulation under massive pressure from the airport authority and its board led by mayor Wowereit, it is arguable that the scale of the subsequent debacle would have gone off the charts.

It is scarcely believable, but… since that near-opening of an airport in that state of unreadiness in 2012, it would have been LESS expensive to scratch everything and start a new airport somewhere else. And yet, since that fateful day, top managers came and left, taking in some cases truly giant payoffs with them when they proved to be just another part of an intractable problem.

Time and again all the participants in the disaster could shrug off their own responsibility, claiming that the problem lay elsewhere. If the truly definitive story of the black hole that devoured so much money and misplaced ambition is ever finally documented in its entirety, it will be the perfect case study of how, when ‘everybody’ is responsible, nobody is left shouldering the blame. 

It is indeed ironic that now, when the airport is finally open after fourteen years of construction with an annual capacity for €54m passengers, barely a fifth of that number will be checking in or out this year. Nor is it likely to be even half full for the foreseeable future. 

Of course, that’s not BER’s fault – and the good taxpayers of Berlin and Brandenburg are already committed to stumping up a further half-billion this year for running costs, with more to come. Still, we can only hope that the airport fulfills the promise of its role as an economic driver for the entire economic corridor between itself and the centre of Berlin. 

Thankfully, there are plenty of signs that this is happening. A study by researchers Bulwiengesa in 2017 identified about 1.6m of new office potential along the airport corridor, which could benefit from Berlin’s serious shortage of inner-city office space. The area around Adlershof, close to the airport, is booming with high-tech companies and 15,000 well-paid workers, while peak rents are still rising. There are plenty of significant new developments in the pipeline. Berlin remains a magnet for investment and – finally-  has a proper airport. Let’s be thankful for that and wish BER a successful future.