Sorry, but that’s the only possible headline for this one.
Berlin’s new Berlin Brandenburg Willy Brandt airport, still under construction after nine years and still nearly three years from completion, is spending €500,000 to replace all its arrival and departure monitors, which have yet to report a single departure or arrival.
Since 2012, at the airport that was originally scheduled to open in 2011, the 750 monitors have been in place, ready to go, connected to the AC power, and running day and night, 24/7/365. Now, nearly six years later, they are near the end of their useful life. A few will be salvaged to live out their lives at Berlin’s existing airports.
The airport project has become an endless tragic joke, under construction since 2009 and now costing several times the original estimate, has been plagued by poor design (one fire-suppression system would have sucked smoke into the terminal), corruption scandals, collapsing roofs and more. And, even if ready, it is not even sufficient to handle the growth in the city’s air traffic.
Newspapers have raised the question: Why replace the monitors now? Why not wait until the airport is ready for them? And one paper suggested looking ahead to see what display technology will be available by 2050—if the airport is ready by then!
Meanwhile, Istanbul’s new airport, a much larger project, will open this fall after being under construction since 2015. Maybe when its engineers and builders are done in October, they’d like to take a try at Berlin?
