When talking about projects that had a disastrous scope creep, the Denver International Airport reigns as one of the most notorious projects. While being a beautiful, large airport, a lot of drama happened behind the scenes during construction.
I know for myself, I absolutely hate checking bags at the airport. With your bags being thrown around and occasionally lost- wouldn’t there have been a better way invented by now?
It all started out with an idea: to completely create a brand-new automated system for handling luggage travel that can be interconnected with all three concourses to reduce plane’s turn-around.
Alas, this project went about 16 months past its hard deadline, cost the city of Denver $560 million over budget and only hit a fraction of the original automation goals. Instead of utilizing all of the three concourses, it was only used at one. For one airline. For outbound flights only. And after 10 years, the one airline that was using it, stopped use. The rest of the airport had to resort to using a manual labor team for any other baggage.
What went wrong?
Well for one, there were so many warning signs that the team leads decided to completely ignore.
1) The building company straight out saying the plan was too complex, and yet the city pushed forward anyway.
2) The timeline was too short. The city of Munich had previously done a similar construction that had taken them 2 years followed by 6 months of testing, and the Denver airport was far larger and had a hard deadline of two years.
3) Senior managers at the building company proposed a 4 year timeline. This was ignored and the project pushed forward with the two year timeline.
If the city of Denver had listened to any of the warnings, they would have had a functional system, not one that went past deadline and costed the city millions of extra dollars with only a fraction of the original design to show.
Another major mistake that was made was not consulting with the key stakeholders. They were left out of the initial planning, and once they were finally informed, the stakeholders had major important changes (like ski equipment handling). Many of these demands required for much of the project to be re-done.
The scope creep of this project happened because of poor time management by the city, the unwillingness to heed warnings from the experts, and a lack of proper control by failing to talk with everybody that was important to the project.
However, despite the baggage system project failure, it doesn’t mean everything has failed. The Denver Airport is still a fully functional normal airport.
… or is it?
Conspiracy Theories
Just because we’re on the topic of the Denver Airport, I feel like I have to touch on some of the wild conspiracy theories surrounding it. Also this airport happens to be the subject of my favorite conspiracy theories.
The first one ties in with the baggage automation issue. While that part of the project went nearly $600m over budget, the total cost of the entire construction went nearly $2 billion over budget, and people aren’t exactly sure why. The total cost of the airport was $4.8 billion dollars, making the extra cost almost double what it should have costed.
When you’re driving into the airport, the first thing you’re greeted with is a 32 foot tall large blue stallion on its hind legs with eyes that glow red 24/7 (lovingly nicknamed “Blucifer”). Now if that isn’t odd enough for airport decor, it turns out this unsettling horse sculpture actually had killed its creator when a piece of it had fallen and severed an artery in his leg.
One of my favorite theories about this airport revolves around some really creepy murals. I remember reading an article about this before I had flown into the airport a few years ago, and when I saw one in person they were just as outlandish and unsettling as I had read about.
There are a series of murals that are in the Jeppesen Terminal. If you look at them all, they’re thought to show a story about apocalyptic biowarfare destroying the world as we know it and a New World Order taking over, also with some strange nazi-resembling imagery. One of which I had bumped into, actually had a quote from a child who had been murdered at Auschwitz.
Oh, and there are gargoyles at baggage claim for some reason.
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