How To F#€k Up An Airport #2: Double The Recipe

This podcast contains occasional course language and adult themes related to the gross incompetence of public figures. Every Berliner knows the new airport isn't finished yet. Few know exactly why. We're here to explain. I'm Maisie Hitchcock. I'm Joel Delroy and together with Yiran Mandik and Daniel Stern we're going fail by fail through the ongoing debacle at the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, BER. Last time we heard about the flaws that undermined BER since its very inception. On this episode we'll go from construction to collapse detailing what was really going on in the lead-up to the shop cancellation of the airport opening party. Today there is one regular service arriving and departing at BER. Unfortunately it's not an airplane. It's a train, an S-Bahn, six carriages long, no passengers on board. Yiran Mandik and I went out to Schonefeld railway station in the dead of night in search of the ghost train to BER. Good morning Yiran. Good morning. Yiran where are we? What are we doing? We're at the S-Bahnhof Flughafen Schonefeld trying to chase the ghost train going to BER every night just to make sure it keeps working until it finally opens. It's a very foggy night. There's not a single living person here. There's a few blinking lights, a few parked trains. It's eerie, no? Just waiting for that ghost train. Well they have to make sure that all the switches work and the lights, the signals. So they have to go through this tunnel every night to make that air in there move in order to prevent mold building in the tunnel and wrecking the whole thing. That actually was done in time for the original opening date in 2011. Can you believe this shit? Here we turn around. Okay, we're fucked. We're busted. Two S-Bahn security guards are walking out to us right now. They'll be wondering what we're up to. We'll just show them our email, hopefully that'll work. What are we doing here, please? We're here to record the train, record the sound when we pass through. So they must have some maps where they can read out. Yes, we brought our email with us and searched it. So the security guards have allowed us to stand here. The helpful security lady pointed out that we could have taken the audio from any train, even one during the day. It's quite right, isn't it? What the fuck are we doing here? It's now 2.30, 2.26 and we've come here to take a noise of a train. We also have three pigeons, one empty beer, one spilled coffee cup with lid flown off. What just happened? The signal just changed. We hear something, we hear something. Oh my god, I see emerging some lights from the fog. Is it the BER train? Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, it's coming. Two lights and what does it say? It's the BER train. It says on the display BER. This is the train that runs every night with no passengers through the tunnels just to keep the air moving. An entire empty train just rolled into the station. What the hell is it doing? Keeping mold away is what it does. I'm gonna try and interview the conductors of the train. It's all good, well paid, the BER is paid, you get extra money for it. For the night shift? Yes, for the work, for the tunnel ventilation. But normally you don't get money anymore, but the company doesn't get it anymore. We can't catch up, can we? Okay, what he said is, he was quite funny, he was like, amused at his own situation of having to drive this empty train to the airport. When I asked him whether he and his colleague would kind of like chuckle about this, he'd be like, no, no, no. Very ironically. They were quite good. They said they have to take the train twice every night because they have to study to be able to drive that train once it's actually running with people in it. And he said, well, they're paying us, it's fine. They're taking it with a good amount of humour in it. The BER ghost train had been pushing air through the tunnels to ward off mold every weekday since October 2011. Unlike the airport, the underground train station was finished on time. So what was going on upstairs? It's June 2010. Things seemed to be going great at BER. After two years of construction, the workers are celebrating the topping out ceremony to mark the completion of the terminal's giant flat roof. So large they say it could cover the entire Olympia Stadion. The shell of the building is finished, an observation tower has been built, 32 metres tall, translucent and twisting, giving visitors a view of what has been labelled Europe's biggest construction site. Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to announce a slight delay in the completion of your airport. The opening scheduled for October 2011 will now take place June 2012. Please sit back, relax, and we appreciate your patience. Well, all right. So there's a slight delay, no big deal. Most projects run a little late. Everyone's still behaving as if things are going to plan. Rainer Schwarz, the CEO of the airport company, Flughafenberl in Brandenburg or FBB, he keeps talking about progress on site. The politicians who are supposed to be scrutinising the project are bragging about their new super airport. The press hasn't got a bad word to say about BER. Here's what was really going on. Back up number 10, double the recipe halfway through baking. The foundations were still being dug at the BER construction site when the FBB managers and their political masters started scribbling over the plans. They ordered the architects to increase the floor size to 360,000 square metres. But as any baker knows, you can't just add 70% more ingredients and expect a perfect cake. So why couldn't they just stick to the recipe? Well, for one thing, it seems someone had finally noticed that the architect Meinhard von Gerken had left shopping space out of his designs due to his hatred of the mollification of airports. BER was heading over budget and shops bring in money. That was one of the biggest construction changes by the way for the main terminal. They calculated the revenue. They calculated how much time they would need to pay the taxpayers' money back. And they found out oh, they needed a larger shopping space. So they changed the plans for the main terminal. That's Martin Daileus, the former pirate party politician who chaired the Berlin Parliamentary Inquiry into the BER debacle. Airport CEO Reines Schwartz demanded up to 50% more shops be squeezed into the design. A whole new walkthrough shopping area was added behind the security gates. To make room for the new duty-free and food outlets, around 10% of the whole terminal had to be reorganised, which changed the flow of passengers through the terminal. That's a big problem in international airports designed to be a hub for transiting passengers because of one word that should be familiar to any non-European who's ever passed through a European airport - Schengen. The name of a town in Luxembourg that now represents long passport queues, visa hassles and the forced ending of Cosmopolitan love affairs after 90 days. Schengen's own regulations govern entry into the EU and they require that passengers be separated into two streams as they transit through an airport. At BER, those separate pathways had been designed already in 2007, but the new shops age into the walkways and whole new routes through the terminal had to be created while building work was already underway. The new building was designed to be a hub for transiting passengers through the terminal, which was the real problem because you cannot change it as you want because there are fire-security issues and you need to build a building with strong walls to prevent fire breaking or entering into the terminal. In the mid-2000s, the aviation industry was a buzz with talk of a new supersized airplane. Airbus was launching the largest passenger plane ever built - the A380. With two floors and 544 seats, it would be 40% bigger than the next nearest jet. Airbus unveiled the A380 at a ceremony in France in January 2005. The first working model flew from Singapore to Sydney at the end of 2007. In Berlin, the airport planners went gargaw for the A380. The BER blueprints were almost finished and construction was about to begin. But none of that mattered when the covers came off the A380. Berlin just had to have one. Construction plans were changed on the fly to make the A380 fit. This involved inserting two new, extra-large gates - one at either end of the terminal - with double-story boarding facilities to reach both levels of the giant plane. More internal space was eaten up by the new boarding areas to accommodate over 500 passengers. There was just one problem. The A380 wasn't coming to Berlin. With no airline ever announced they wanted to start and land with the big plans in Berlin, it was nothing airlines planned ahead to. Lufthansa, BER's biggest customer, bought a fleet of A380s and stationed them at Frankfurt but never committed to landing them at BER. Air Berlin, then the second biggest airline, said they might buy one, but never actually did. So where did the idea come from? According to the minutes from an FBB supervisory board meeting in 2006, the orders came right from the top. At the end of the presentation, Mayor Klaus Wohlweit asked what it would take and how much it would cost to have boarding gates for the A380 ready by the opening date. In his point of view, it would be good for the image of the new airport if it could handle the A380. FBB's supervisory board meeting minutes 2006. And this is how Thomas Weier, the airport's technical director until 2008, recalled the meeting when he gave evidence to the parliamentary inquiry. My response was crystal clear. You can build it, but it won't be used for the next 15 years because the A380 won't be coming to Berlin anytime soon. The market is simply not big enough. Now, to be fair, four years later, Lufthansa did schedule one special A380 flight from BER to Frankfurt on the planned opening date of June 3, 2012, which, of course, never happened. But they never announced any regular service. Today, the fantasy of attracting the A380 seems like a desperate seduction manoeuvre, the object of which has since lost its appeal. The A380 is becoming a failure for Airbus. It's sold 317 of the aircraft in the hype following its launch, but hasn't received a single order since 2015. Airlines have found that small and medium-sized aircraft make more financial sense. An existing A380 fleet is likely to only ever fly between big international hubs, and in Germany, that means Frankfurt and Munich, not little old BER. Lockup number 12, forgetting the liquids in your carry-on. Do you remember what it was like to fly before September 11, 2001? I do. It was a breeze, wasn't it? The security was library standard. The biggest hassle was worrying about your analog film being wiped by the X-ray machine. And then, this happened. I am one. We just had a plane crashed into Alpha 4 on the World Trade Center, transmit a second alarm and start relocating companies into the area. The World Trade Center tower number one is on fire. The whole outside of the bonus is a huge explosion. We have a number of floors on fire that look like the plane was aiming towards the building. And suddenly, airport security became what it is today. Disrobing, removing your laptop, tapping your pockets, waiting for the family in front to disassemble a baby carriage and to top it all off, being imaged naked in a full-body scanner. The whole security procedure got a lot more arduous after the European Union introduced a new airport security regulation, known as Directive 297-2010, to control liquids, aerosols and gels. This required the installation of new scanning equipment, which took up a lot more space. In May 2010, the German Federal Police warned the airport company, FBB, it needed up to a third more floor space in the security area. The floor plan was already tight due to the addition of shops. The only solution was to squeeze an entire new floor between two existing floors. Architect Meinhard von Gerkan explained the changes. We had to insert an intermediate level, which led to a lower height on the ground floor, which in turn required adjustments of the technical equipment, which in turn triggered extensive planning and construction changes. Meinhard von Gerkan, 2013 But it shouldn't have been a surprise. The EU had been working on the Directive since 2008, and it was taking advice from both the airport's Council International Europe and the Association of European Airlines. But the BER planners seem to have been out of the loop. Fuck up number 13. Not budgeting for the budget airlines. In movies, when canoodling couples and busy executives board planes, they walk from the terminal through the boarding gate and onto the aircraft through a continuous covered walkway. For those listeners who fly low-cost European airlines, that walkway is called a jet bridge, or air bridge, and it's one of the small luxuries that better-off people pay for when they fly on fancy airlines. The rest of us are herded like cattle under buses, then we walk across gusty tarmacs and up rickety stairs, all while getting lungs full of kerosene and burst eardrums. The reason low-cost carriers use these so-called hard stands with stairs is, of course, because it's cheaper. Airports charge extra to use a jet bridge, not much, just a couple of euros per passenger, but that's why your ticket sometimes costs less than your lunch. It's also a lot faster to fill a plane using stairs through the front and rear doors, and time is money. Back in the early 2000s, low-cost carriers had around 10% market share in Europe. When construction began on BER in 2008, that had increased to over 30%. Today, it's around 40%. BER was designed for a pre-easy jet world. The original layout had only jet bridges in mind. So-called walk boarding gates were only considered as expansion possibilities. This oversight was corrected, and the board and managers made two major change requests. In 2008, they ordered the extension of the northern and southern piers of the terminal to include more walk boarding gates. This was a sensible response to changing market conditions, but the realisation came just a little too late. Building was already underway. They also threw in a few changes for the benefit of the well-to-do clientele. An additional three airport lounges were added, including one for Air Berlin, which, well, won't be getting much use anymore. Extra shops, A380 facilities, low-cost boarding gates, bigger security areas. Architect Meinhard von Gerken published a graph plotting all of the 487 change requests his company received from the airport. In 2008 and 2009, there's a smattering of red dots representing changes. In 2010 and 2011, it looks like blood splattering against a wall. In January 2010, FBB's managers declared that no more changes would be allowed. But the change requests just kept coming from all sides, even from the managers themselves. And this is all happening, not just as construction is underway, but even after the concrete was already dry. They changed all those things at a time where the rough structure of the main terminal was already built. After those changes and criteria, almost every part of the building should have changed with it. You can imagine, you need time for that. You need planning for that. You need testing for that. If you change the way the passengers go through the building, and if you change that, you need to change a lot of doors, you need to change a lot of stairways, you need to change the climate system, the fire extinguisher system, fire doors, fire walls and stuff like that. And that was the reason why everything went to hell and nobody noticed. Usually, when you hire a contractor, you ask them for a fixed price and a fixed timeline. That's how things started at BER. But when the politicians and managers started pretending the airport was made out of plasticine, they also had to tear up the fixed price contracts. They wanted to have more shopping malls. They needed to change the plan. In order to change the plan, they needed to stop the companies from building, because they were already on building the terminal. They didn't want to do that. So you might say, brilliant solution from the board of the FBB was change the plans while building. When you have no plan, you cannot set a certain price tag. And so they changed the contracts for keeping the construction running. And the price tag on every part of the construction and every contract they wanted to make was suddenly a lot larger, more expensive. Coming up in a few minutes, cracks start to appear, actual and figurative. But no one notices because they're all too busy planning a party. Radio Speighelf is supported by listeners like you who make a monthly donation of between one and 10 euros. We use that money to pay our contributors, including artists and musicians, to subscribe to newspapers to stay informed, and to pay our online costs. Anything left over gets used for team drinks and dinners. If you think we deserve a drink for the work we've done on this podcast, why not go to radiospeighelf.com and become a regular supporter. Thanks to all those who've already done so. This show is for you. Across this series, we're highlighting Berlin cultural projects that we think deserve some attention. This one is actually outside of Berlin, and that's part of its appeal. Coconut Workation Retreat is a hotel/co-working space in the Brandenburg countryside. Coconut stands for Community, Concentration and Nature. And a Workation is what it sounds like, some time away from your usual routine to focus on a project. It's a place you can go to work in an inspiring setting, while meeting other creative people, eating great local food and relaxing in the beautiful countryside. Coconut is located in a renovated manor house close to the spa town of Bad Belzig, about 90km southwest of Berlin. The property has several beautiful old buildings, fields, woods, an orchard and a little lake. Coconut is perfect for freelancers with looming deadlines, small teams working on projects, and artists and writers trying to unblock. I go out to Coconut about once a month, and it's so nice to take a train out of the city, see the seasons change, meet interesting people, pick apples from a tree, all safe in the knowledge that I can return to Berlin where there aren't any wolves. You too can live the Brandenburg dream without actually moving there, by visiting coconut-space.com. As the opening date approached, no one outside of the airport project knew about the endless change requests and their impact on the project. How could they? All the activity was being hidden behind a wall of commercial confidentiality. Even politicians in the Berlin Parliament weren't being given access to details. And the airport company FBB was releasing a steady stream of positive statements, like this one. The construction work has progressed on schedule. Passenger terminal, jet bridges, connections to the road networks as well as planned buildings are to a large extent ready. The opening date of June 3, 2012 is firm. Until then, the works on BER will run at full speed. FBB media released December 14, 2011. To the outside world, BER seemed to be on track to open in June 2012. Berlin Brandenburg Airport started appearing as a destination on flight booking platforms. Airlines adjusted their schedules. Tickets were issued showing the exciting new airport code BER. 100 days till opening. Tegel and Schönefeld airports will close on the evening of June 2 and on the morning of June 3, the new airport with the IATA code BER will open. FBB media release February 2, 2012. In those final months, 12,000 volunteers signed up to take part in live tests in the terminal. Each day for several weeks, 250 Berliners carrying fake boarding cards and trundling empty suitcases lined up at the check-in desks, passed through security and walked to their gates. Watching videos of the tests now, you have to wonder why nobody asked whether the airport could really open in a matter of weeks. The interior is a mess. Nothing looks finished. In early 2012, an inspection team called Operation Readiness and Airport Transfer, or ORAT, was called in to conduct a six-month review of the airport. But it had to shut down the tests early and leave by April because the building was deemed unsafe for use. Emergency workers simulated scenarios on-site, a crash landing on the runway, 100 actors with fake blood on their faces, 600 firefighters and police, a helicopter to transport the pretend injured. The results were not encouraging. In March 2012, the auditing company McKinsey wrote a letter to the airport company warning about critical failures. After almost four months of trials, it has been found that the operative ability of the new airport is well behind schedule due to massive construction delays. There is an extremely high risk for internal failure on the planned opening date. McKinsey, March 14, 2012. Two other auditing companies also wrote letters warning that the airport couldn't open as planned. A later report by the Brandenburg State Controlling Office found that weeks before the opening date, the airport was only 56.2% service ready and only 26 of the 102 gates were usable. Here's a list of some of the problems. Flight information system not working. Emergency announcement system not working. Check in capacity too small for the passenger volume. Customs areas not in place. Video cameras insufficient. Escalators moving walkways and lifts inoperative. Car parking towers unusable. Standard network unstable. Data connection to the airport fire station not functioning. Sporadic power failures. Later, the management and the board would claim they had no idea things were going so badly. But there's evidence that they were aware of the problems but kept them hidden. An internal working group called Task Force Brandschutz or Fire Safety was set up and met five times in early 2012. The name of this Task Force shows that they knew there were serious issues. Despite all the warnings, despite the obviously unusable condition of the terminal, the airport managers and the supervising politicians were behaving like the orchestra on the Titanic. Fuck up. Number 16. Plan a party instead of a funeral. On April 20, 2008, the 15 members of the supervisory board held their last planned meeting before the June 3 opening date. The main topic for discussion was not the Hawi state of the terminal, nor the multiple letters and warnings of impending catastrophe. Rather, the politicians and managers were quibbling over the plans for the May 24 opening party. They envisaged a huge and triumphant ceremony with 10,000 invited guests and 30,000 members of the public. Chancellor Angela Merkel would arrive in the government jet and walk down a red carpet to the new terminal. At the meeting, the supervisory board members decided that the entry ticket to the party should include a voucher for food and one drink. The minister-president of Brandenburg, Matthias Platzek, was clearly worried that his state was being overshadowed in all the excitement. He told the meeting that he wished for future communications to emphasise that... The new BER actually sits entirely in the territory of Brandenburg. The minutes of that meeting contain only a few references to problems with the fire safety system. But the managers insist they've got a solution, which they call partial automation. The board approves an extra 13.9 million euros for last-minute changes to the fire safety system. Here's Martin Delius. The problem with that was that the board members always said we asked the company. The company said everything is an order, we will open and we trusted the company. You can argue that members of the board of advisory of a publicly owned and run company should be a bit more critic about what the board or the head of the company is saying to them the CEO, we can name him, he was Rainer Schwarz. Martin not only always was saying everything is right, but he also told the advisory board that there are problems, he named the problems and he always found, at least on paper, a solution for the problems. We later found out that almost all of those so-called solutions were bullshit. It's a hard word, but you have to say it like that because none of the solutions that were presented to the board of advisory had any effect on the problems they were there to solve. The night of June 2nd was to be a momentous occasion. The two operating airports, Tegel and Schoenfeld, were to close and all operations would move to BER. This would require a massive logistical exercise. The entire highway from Tegel to BER would be closed off to make way for a convoy of trucks driving bumper to bumper, relocating equipment from the old terminal to the new one. 600 trucks had to be hired from transport companies across Europe for the job. A lot of equipment had already been moved in anticipation. The whole city was getting ready for a party. Berlin's public broadcasting service, RBB, announced a television special called 24-Hour Airport, the airport relocation live, with 15 presenters and 50 reporters giving round the clock coverage. They cleared the schedule of all normal programming to make way for a spectacular, emotional and historic moment. On June 3rd, BER would officially open. Lufthansa and Air Berlin would share the honour of the first take-off. At 5.30am, a plane from each airline would take off on the parallel runways. It would be the beginning of a new chapter in the story of Berlin's progress from divided city to the gateway of the world. Ladies and gentlemen, the airport scheduled to open in 26 days is experiencing technical difficulties. We regret to announce that opening is hereby cancelled. As a token of our appreciation, you will receive a bill for several billion euros. Nobody expected this. The media were called to a surprise press conference on May 8th, 2012 to find a panel of stony-faced men. Airport CEO Rainer Schwarz dropped the bombshell announcement. We have invited you to this press conference because we have to announce to you that we cannot ensure the June 3rd opening date. We are immediately stopping the partially commenced three-location from Tegel to the new airport. Mayor Klaus Wolveright also said a few words. This is not a good day for the Berlin Brandenburg-Willybrand Airport. Not a good day for the citizens of both our states or the many visitors to our region. Nor for the airlines. They had to hurriedly reschedule thousands of flight plans and reissue tickets for millions of passengers. Air Berlin said the cost of this exercise was incalculable. Many Berliners have stories about their flights being rerouted on that day. Here's journalist Konrad Werner. So in 2012 I used to have to travel every month to Bonn to do night shifts. People forget that in 2012 the airport was 10 days from opening. They were really going to open the airport in 10 days and so I bought a ticket for the event following month and my ticket was leaving from Tegel and returning to BER and that's what it said on the ticket. A week later I was leaving one week and coming back a week later to BER. So that's how close we were to having a new airport in 2012. That's five years ago. And what happened? Well, I just flew back to Tegel. They said no, I forgot, no, there's no airport, sorry, I'm just going to have to pretend that never happened. But it said on my ticket BER, imagine. Did you keep the ticket? It was just an online ticket. No, I didn't. Some people have said that. I said it would be worth money now. Probably not though. I mean, I probably have the email, I mean maybe the email has got some kind of antique value. The reason it all came to a halt was because of one man who refused to put his signature on a crucial piece of paper. Depending on your perspective, he could be considered the greatest hero of the BER story for daring to acknowledge problems while everyone else was trying to pretend them away. But he has also been labelled a provincial perfectionist whose nitpicking derailed a multi-billion euro project. His name is Stefan Lager. Lager's job title is Landrat, or administrator of the district of Dahme Sprivald. Every building needs to be inspected and approved for safety before the public is allowed in, and that applies even when the government itself is doing the building. The BER construction plans changed so often that its original building permits were voided and new paperwork had to be filed several times. The office responsible for inspecting the building and certifying its safety happened to be the regional building supervisory department in the Brandenburg town of Luban. Stefan Lager is the elected administrator in charge of the department. I recently drove down to Luban, which is a pleasant little town surrounded by canals which tourists can paddle along in the summer. It's also where your Sprivald pickles come from, but I wasn't there for the pickles. I was there to meet the hero/stickler of BER, Stefan Lager, and to ask him why in May of 2012 he refused to allow the airport to open. We were discussing the fire safety doors. In the last few months they couldn't be closed or connected to the corresponding fire alarm, which isn't acceptable. It wasn't set out loud, but it was understood that they wanted to use actors as living fire alarms. Hang on. What did he just say? Fuck up number 17. Use humans as living fire alarms. Each time the airport bosses changed the plans, they messed with the fire safety systems. It wasn't just a matter of putting in a few extra smoke detectors and fire alarms. Huge buildings also need large smoke extraction systems to clear the air in case of a fire. The airport had increased in size by 70% from the original plans, but the smoke extraction system couldn't be so easily scaled up. The architecture of the building meant that the smoke in the lower floors had to be dragged down underneath the building before it could be vented out through the chimneys. Anyone who paid attention in school science class should know that hot air rises. BER had a massive ventilation system to drag smoke down instead of up, and this system was so large and complex that workers on site gave it a nickname. By some accounts, the monster is one of the largest ventilation systems of its kind in the world. In the case of a fire, it has to clear the entire airport of smoke within 15 minutes, requiring a suction capacity of 3.4 million cubic metres of air per hour. At one point, a massive cavern had to be dug underneath the main terminal to add extra ventilators to the monster to keep up with the expanding floor plan. There were also 3,400 fire doors in the building. In the event of a fire, doors are supposed to automatically open or close to either allow people to escape or to stop air from feeding a fire, but the ORAT tests in early 2012 found the fire door system simply wasn't working, neither was the emergency communication system. With the opening date looming, the airport managers turned to creative problem solving. The solution they came up with was ingenious for its simplicity, with the only downside being its fairly high chance of catastrophic failure. In the BER planning documents, it is referred to as the "Machiner Menschschnittstelle", which translates as "Human Machine Interface". The plan was to hire 800 workers, sometimes referred to as extras or students, and have them stand guard near the fire doors, looking out for signs of smoke, ready to jump into action and open or shut doors as required. They would be armed with mobile phones to call in an emergency. This was the plan presented to the supervisory board at their April 20th meeting, where it was called a "harshly automated fire safety system", although in reality it seems like it involved no automation at all. And this is what the board approved an extra payment of €13.9m for, to employ and train the 800 extras in how to perform the functions of a fire alarm. And everyone in that meeting, from the federal and state ministers, down to the airport's managers and technical experts, all agreed that this was a winning idea, and it very nearly became a reality. It was up to Stefan Lager to demand a meeting with the airport bosses on May 7th, to tell them they were insane. The argument from my side was, "Colleagues, do you really want to have hundreds of young students in orange vests, sitting on camping stools, maybe with a lunchbox and thermos, because they're working late shifts?" And when something unfortunate happens, they have to call out, "Max, close the door, there's a fire over here!" Stefan Lager refused to issue the all-important Building Safety Certificate. And with that, BER was officially, for the first time, declared a failure. He was the most intriguing, arrogant and most complicated witness at the whole board. This project was a new bar, a new construction, then we had to renovate, reconstruct a new building. Yes, everybody in the sector knows that the reconstruction or renovation is always more difficult, so it's always more expensive as well. We're here at the BER terminal. These are the famous, infamous escalators that do not work at all. You get off the escalator and then, about two meters on, you get to another three steps that you have to climb to actually get to the top. These escalators are, in fact, too short. In the next episode of How to fuck up an airport. This series is a production of Radio Speckhelf and Radio Einz. It's produced by me, Joel Delroy, with Maisie Hitchcock, Juran Mandik and Daniel Stern. We've drawn on several key sources for all the facts, including the 2016 Berlin Parliamentary Inquiry into BER, Der Spiegel's excellent article, made in Germany, from August 2017, Frank Veloskop's 2009 book, B.B.I., a Neue Berliner bank scandal. The Herdy School of Governance report into public infrastructure planning, from 2015, as well as our own interviews with original sources. Special thanks to the band Ducks for creating the music for this series, and to Jim Avignon for designing the artwork. For more Berlin news and English, visit the Radio Speckhelf archive at www.radiospeckhelf.com. Radio Speckhelf, Berlin news in English.