Philippines aviation industry revs up for busier skies

MANILA, Philippines — The aviation industry is slowly coming back to life and along with busier skies come pilots, cabin crew, and an aircraft fleet that are shaking off the rust.

With airlines losing billions and their workforce being slashed dramatically, pilots and flight attendants who were fortunate to keep their jobs remain deprived from flying like they used to.

“Obviously, a long period of absence from flying can degrade ones skill in the efficient and safe operation of a complex machine like our aircraft. Skill and experience degradation is hazardous of course to safe flying,” AirAsia Philippines head of corporate safety department Christopher Natividad told The STAR.

“I have to admit that a good number of pilots have grown out of shape physically because of the lengthy time spent staying home. But most I would say have kept that personal discipline in keeping themselves physically, emotionally, and psychologically fit to fly,” he said.

The 48-year-old captain and instructor pilot himself endured almost five months of being grounded early this year due to the pandemic.

He said his first flight back after the hiatus was a bit strange at first, but he was able to quickly regained that muscle memory for flying an aircraft “just like riding a bicycle.”

“Of course, my retraining in the flight simulator, a regulatory requirement, greatly facilitated my recurrency for line or actual flying,” Natividad said.

Before the pandemic, he said a pilot normally flies at least 70 hours a month on an average. These days, this has dropped to around 15 to 20 hours a month.

As a result, he said an airline pilot at present could be losing as much as 50 to 70 percent of his usual pre-pandemic earnings, depending on the nature of salary cuts implemented by each airline.

For some, however, the hit was far more than just salary cuts.

“From a well-known company, due to the pandemic, I got retrenched. After March, flights were reduced, resulting in less income. In July, I got retrenched,” said Mark Cruzado, a former pilot of budget carrier Cebu Pacific.

From flying 70 hours a month before the pandemic, Cruzado said he was assigned to fly as a cargo pilot in March, and has flown only 15 hours from April to June.

He said not flying regularly brings the risk of being non proficient to the flight and getting rusty with the flight procedures.

“To mitigate these things, we normally review our manuals, flight procedures and practice with the mock up,” Cruzado said.

Apart from those behind the cockpit, their partners in flight – the cabin crew – are also ensuring they are in tiptop shape and are ready when duty calls, even it is not as often as before.

“As a flight attendant for five years, it required me to adjust my life completely different. The skies are not as busy as it is before. As of today, we still get to fly once or twice a month, which I am very thankful for,” said Christian Hong, a cabin crew of one of the country’s airlines.

Hong said the pandemic has completely reshaped how customer interaction should be fostered, which he admitted was hard at first.

“But I have learned that there are still plenty of ways on how we can effectively interact with our passengers,” he said.

“There’s a lot of changes, on our routines, first and foremost is keeping a safe distance with our passengers which is really new to us as we are trained to make our guests as close as possible to us, to be able to let them feel that they are well taken care of and keeping them at ease and comfortable during their travel with us,” an AirAsia Philippines cabin crew who requested for anonymity said.

For these flight attendants, they believe it is important to read and review flight manuals from time to time and always make sure that they stay updated on whatever procedures are being implemented.

But long time offs are not only impacting the people involved in-flight – they also affect the massive machines that actually carry people to their destinations.

Majority of airplanes are also not able to take off regularly, while some are parked in storage indefinitely due to low demand.

December, for example, is supposed to be the time of the year when the airline industry is at its busiest, as people fly abroad or to their provinces to spend the holidays with their families.

However, that has not been the case so far with travel restrictions still in place and overall passenger confidence not yet back to its full strength.

“Aircrafts were designed to fly. Keeping them on ground is causing more stress to the structure compared to flying and the procedure on how we maintain these grounded aircrafts is different from how we maintain aircrafts with regular flights,” said Emmanuel Paolo De Guzman, an aircraft mechanic from Lufthansa Technik Philippines.

De Guzman said aircraft manufacturers have a designated program designed for grounded fleets which are required to be accomplished on a specific time frame to ensure their air worthiness.

“For those aircrafts which are being used for flights, we follow a different set of programs or tasks to always ensure safety and airworthiness,” he said.

“It is always easier to maintain an active aircraft, I would compare it to a car you drive daily, you get to monitor the slightest change to the steering or hear the lightest squeak and respond to it the soonest with a perfect solution before it worsens,” De Guzman said.

Earl Vincent Mananquil, another aircraft mechanic from Lufthansa Technik Philippines, said prior to the pandemic, his team was handling 40 to 50 flights per day.

This plummeted to only three to five flights a day at the start of the pandemic from March to July, and has slowly increased to 12 flights at present.

“The potential risks or issues that may arise if an aircraft is not being used regularly are corrosion of certain aircraft parts and battery discharge,” Mananquil said.

“But regardless if an aircraft is not being used regularly, as long as the maintenance program is being accomplished regularly by skilled mechanics, these aircrafts will always remain airworthy and safe to fly,” De Guzman assured.

Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) spokesperson Eric Apolonio said there has already been a number of minor accidents this year involving business jets and helicopters.

With investigations for these incidents still undergoing, Apolonio said it is difficult to say if any of them were caused by faulty engines or “rusty” pilots.

He noted, however, that there is so far no recorded accidents involving commercial airlines this year.

“For CAAP we validate their (pilots) licenses yearly. There is a recurrency training before their license is renewed,” he said.

“Airlines, especially for commercial ones, they have their own department for training and maintenance. They have mechanics to maintain their aircraft and trainings for their pilots,” Apolonio said.