Going on from the earlier post about Lufthansa re-siting all their new Berlin service back to Berlin-Tegel, it seems that the new opening date for the brand new Berlin Brandenburg Airport will be now the 17th March 2013.
Continuing from the original reason to delay the opening – it is to allow more time to complete fire safety systems.
The new Berlin airport was due to open on the 3rd June to a massive fanfare, closing the old Tegel Airport and Schoenefeld terminals. As a result, Air Berlin and Lufthansa have had to try and fit their new big timetables into the old airports (namely Tegel).
The price of failure has been swift – The BER supervisory board also announced that Manfred Koertgen, managing director for operations and construction, will leave the company. In addition, the airport will also terminate its contract with Planungsgemeinschaft Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg International, the consortium responsible for project management and site supervision.
It seems the partially automated fire protection and control system was proposed for the original opening, with a fully automatic system to go online later. This is now being ramped up to a completion of December 2012, allowing more testing of the facilities as well as inspections, approvals and certification to take place to the new 17th March 2013 date.
It’s annoyed a lot of people and airlines who were looking forward to getting this airport up and running.
The losses of the delay have yet to be realised, but as well as fiscal losses, there will be a big loss of face for not getting something up and running on-time.
And perhaps, that’s the thing that’s going to stick the most. People have long memories….
With LH’s expanded schedule/service from BER, is it even physically possible to keep everything ex-TXL?
Personally – I don’t think so. TXL was space constrained to start with. With the additional services… I think they’re going struggle.
Very quickly.
Looks very poor. Germany has a black eye from this one. Surprised there aren’t more legal implications…