Every ticket would come with a voucher for a meal and a drink. The detail is in the minutes of an April 20, 2012 meeting of the supervisory board of the company building Berlin’s new airport, as later quoted by the chairman of a parliamentary inquiry. The main celebration was set for May 24, for about 40,000 people, with the Chancellor attending. The first passengers were due on June 3.
The inquiry read the party planning as a sign that the board did not know how bad things were. It also found that management had altered critical passages of the progress report prepared for that very meeting, with clear intent to deceive. Its phrase for the mood on the project that spring was a collective loss of touch with reality. It described people who, despite every warning sign, shared an unconditional belief that the airport would be finished in time.
Eighteen days after the board meeting, on May 8, the opening was called off. It was 26 days away.
The trigger was the fire protection system, above all the smoke extraction. The terminal had some 5,000 smoke dampers, the airport’s head of planning and construction told the inquiry. In one installation of perhaps 300, 80 failed to open or opened the wrong way. Fans built to pull 100,000 cubic meters of air an hour pulled against closed dampers, and some ducts collapsed inward.
To make the date anyway, the airport proposed a stopgap known as the Mensch-Maschine-Schnittstelle, the man-machine interface. In four rooms, two staff each would watch for alarms, read which detector had gone off, and press the button for one of 350 fire scenarios on a switch panel. April tests showed the system was still too faulty. On May 3, the inspectors from TÜV Rheinland told the airport there was no longer time for the required tests.
Yet the inquiry treated the smoke system as the trigger, not the cause. The state of completion across the whole terminal, it concluded, would have prevented an orderly opening anyway. A trial-operations report put the airport’s operational readiness on May 8 at 56.2 percent.
The design had kept changing while the building went up. A walk-boarding pier was added in 2006, a second in 2007, along with a bigger shopping area. In 2008 came a full level for non-Schengen passengers and double-deck jet bridges. In 2010, new EU security rules led to two extra pavilions, which forced a year-long halt on about a tenth of the terminal. The same board decision moved the opening from October 30, 2011, to June 3, 2012, a delay the board had been told was the shortest possible. The general planners’ representative told the inquiry the owner had asked for more than 500 changes. The airport’s technical director put it at 200 to 250.
The new dates did not hold either: March 17, 2013, then October 27, 2013, then a window in autumn 2017. A second inquiry found that the smoke extraction design itself had been a planning error, which the airport only concluded in 2014, and the whole system had to be redesigned. The construction budget had been about €2.4 billion. The latest estimates the second inquiry heard were above €5 billion.
The airport opened on October 31, 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, with a brief ceremony. It had been a long road, the chief executive, Engelbert Lütke Daldrup, said, so “we aren’t celebrating a party today. We are just opening.”