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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

If you listen to the podcast they explain that it wasn't his fault.

Spoilers: he designed BER for fast passenger transit, just like Tegel, but the airport authorities wanted more shopping space. So they crammed as many shops as they could in detriment of the passenger experience. And then there's the situation with the rise of low-cost airlines who weren't allowed to use the jetway...

I definitely recommend listening to the whole series. It's really well done and a must-listen for anyone with interest in project management.

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This glosses over some stuff that is definitely his fault.

The first issue that caused the issues, the fire system, was designed to suck air underground, because the architect did not want a fire system to obstruct his roof, never mind that smoke and hot air naturally rise. https://www.thegermanreview.de/p/the-real-story-behind-berli...

Maybe half-invented, but I read an architect's memoirs some years ago and he was saying how around the 1940s there were often cases when he and his chief-architect/supervisor at the time were actually chased out (like, physically) from the construction sites whenever they were coming in to add/make some changes that the constructor was considering as being too over the top/unrealistic. We need for that attitude to come back, at least in a metaphorical way, otherwise we'll continue being stuck with projects like this one.

Why would you chase the architect with his insane ideas away when you're getting paid by the hour and the project must be completed at some point because there's no alternative for the government? Unfortunately nobody appears to come off as not corrupt or idiotic in some way in this story.

Because most workers, even though they get paid by the hour, actually want to see the job done. Plenty of people want to do a good job, so when they see someone coming in and adding to the workload to make the job worse they’ll, naturally, tell them to piss off.

There’s also the issue of reputational damage.

Everyone associated with BER is now tainted by association.

Even by the claims of your article, it doesn't sound really like it was his fault. The system was designed to a specification, whether or not the architect was given too much free reign is entirely on the board.

If you hire a design team to create a car with a massive hole where the engine and wheels should be, because it is more "clean", and then neglect to hire an engineer to check their work is feasible, is it on the design team or on you being incompetent?

You can say all you want "hot air naturally rises", true, but I doubt an architect has the training to be a safety engineer, and before you say "oh well that's obvious", consider that heavy objects naturally fall to the earth, and yet we have airplanes.

They had a design which would work, but nobody in charge actually did the legwork of bothering to check if it was feasible or not, and/or bungled it so badly even if it were feasible it was like attaching a helicopter to an airplane and then wondering why it didn't fly...

The whole not using the jetway thing in Germany blows my mind. I flew Lufthansa SEA-FRA in 2019, and the fully packed 747 had to walk onto the ramp, and load up into buses to get to the terminal. Outrageous. The only time I've ever done that in NA is flying at places like CAK in a micro regional jet.

LCCs generally do this because charges for the apron are cheaper than the jetway.

With Lufthansa, I'd assume that FRA is super busy and didn't actually have a gate available at the time; a 747 is a really large aircraft to load using buses.

Apron buses are very common in large airports and I always found it really efficient. From memory I’ve used them at Haneda, Narita and KL. Perhaps the ones in Germany are just altered metro buses though, which would be terrible. Apron buses are efficient due to being low to the ground, having very wide doors to accomodate quick loading and unloading, typically no seats.

They may be efficient for the airport, but they suck balls for the passengers.

The last thing I want to do after a long and tiring flight is load up into a bunch of packed buses.

They may be efficient given the layout of the airport (which can't be changed), but if you are to design a new airport, you cannot beat the efficiency of jetways. Hundreds of people just walking down the hallway.

Buses are a lot less efficient than proper jetways. Why are European airports so far behind?

European low-cost airlines are terrible. They do everything they can to lower the fees they pay. That often involves skipping major airports, unless they can negotiate a cheap enough deal with the airport. Those deals tend to involve things that make the passenger experience worse, because the airports don't want normal airlines to choose the same deal.

If you choose a normal airline and fly to any reasonably big airport that's not overcrowded, you'll get a jetway outside exceptional situations.

I've flown on major airlines through German hub airports and was stuck riding a bus to the airplane.

A decent new airport or significant airport reconstruction costs probably $5B+ (DEN cost $4.8B in the 90s; Beijing Daxing cost $11.5B) In austerity-minded Europe there really isn’t money for this. Even if there was, NIMBYs and green campaigners mean there is very little appetite to pursue it politically.

Oh, we have them, but they charge extra for it. Capitalism, you know.

They also cram the busses sardine-full, despite having signs all over exhorting everyone to keep a 1,5m distance, and half the people are unmasked.

thisisfine.jpg

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