The SUN HK : NAIA inches back to normal flight schedules

Planes line up for takeoff at NAIA.

With 360 flights and 65,000 passengers already affected by the shutdown of the country's air traffic management system, the Ninoy Aquino International Airport today chipped at the backlog of incoming and outgoing flights.

It has announced it will be open for 24 hours a day for at least three days, while gradually bringing operations from a maximum 15 arrivals per hour to the normal level of 20.

“It will take around 72 hours or thereabouts for the airlines to normalize their operations,” Cesar Chiong, general manager of the Manila International Airport Authority told ANC news channel.

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But Transport Secretary Jaime Bautista is looking beyond that.

He said President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has asked him to prepare a proposal for a backup system to prevent future flight suspensions. He expects it to cost more than the P13 billion spent to build the system that failed.

The Air Traffic Management Center – which oversees all flights in Philippine airspace -- was inaugurated in 2019 by then President Rodrigo Duterte, who had it built in 2018 with financing from Japan International Cooperation Agency.

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With the current systems, Bautista estimated that the Philippines was 10 years behind its peers.

“This is not really an airport issue. This is an air traffic management system issue. If you will compare us with Singapore, for one, malaking difference (there’s a big difference). They are at least 10 years ahead of us,” he said.

“Although it’s a system that was introduced in 2010, na-implement natin ito (we implemented this) in 2018, so parang midlife na itong system na ito na kailangan na talaga natin sigurong iimprove or i-modernize (the system is already in its midlife, so we really need to improve or modernize it). Siguro (Maybe) we can still use it, but we need to upgrade this to a better system.”

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The shutdown, which Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) had initially described as “technical issues”, began at about 9:40am on Sunday, Jan. 1, when the primary power supply failed. It was not explained how such failure occurred, and Meralco has clarified that its supply of power to the facility was normal at that time.

The generator kicked in, but because it was already faulty, it was not providing enough power needed by the center.

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When they connected the system directly to the Meralco line, they experienced over-voltage and power surge from 220 volts to 380, burning out crucial equipment called very small aperture terminals (VSAT), which receive satellite data used by planes and air traffic management systems.

It will take days to import these components to bring operations back to normal.

But such explanations are not enough for politicians.

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Sen. Grace Poe, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Public Services, wants a legislative inquiry because it is a national security concern.

“The failure points to [Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines] and their navigation equipment,” she said. “There needs to be transparency and accountability from CAAP. We will, therefore, conduct a hearing as part of the Senate's oversight function, to determine who is liable, and what we need to do to avoid the malfunction from happening again.”

House Minority Leader France Castro (ACT Teachers party-list) noted that the supposed power outage happened just two days after Transportation Secretary Bautista said that the administration of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. proposed NAIA’s privatization.

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“With the announcement of the DOTr on privatization of NAIA on December 30 and the ‘power outage’ yesterday, we cannot blame the public to think that this was meant to fast track its selling even though citizens were not consulted and were not told of the results of higher airplane fares,” she said.

Bayan Muna chairman Neri Colmenares said: "The latest breakdown of the flight systems in our airports is another sign of the government's inability to provide even the most basic needs of our people--whether it is managing airports or controlling the price of onions,"