Now that the dust has settled, so to speak, let me dwell on the unfortunate incident involving Xiamen Airlines that crippled flights at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA). For several days, the resulting chain reaction of delayed, if not cancelled flights, have caused travel nightmares for thousands of passengers in the Philippines and across the world.
I am no expert in aviation but I am just listening to the commonsense comment of my pilot son on the Xiamen plane incident. (So far, my 28-year-old pilot son has logged more than 1,600 hours flying time since he started flying international and domestic routes. Thank God, my pilot son has not figured in any much serious incident.)
Without my son’s permission, I would quote his comment: “All they need are the equipment.” Trying to fish more information from him, he went on to say if only NAIA has the equipment, it would have taken them a few hours only to remove the entire aircraft out of the runway.
Amid heavy downpour last Aug. 17 a few minutes before midnight, Xiamen Air Flight MF8667 skidded off the NAIA International Runway 06/24. With Xiamen Airline officials and workers flown here, foul weather again was blamed for the delay that made ground turned very soft to extricate the plane using the aircraft removal equipment from the airport’s Crash and Rescue Unit (ACRU).
However, I gathered that there should be enough steel-matting laid on the ground to support the rubber-lifting equipment. These are all part of the aircraft removal equipment supposed to be at the disposal of the ACRU. When the rubber-lifting failed to move the disabled aircraft out of the mud, NAIA called upon the help of a construction company and rented cranes that were brought to the site more than 24 hours after the incident.
Anyway, based on the aircraft recovery procedures stipulated by the International Civil Aviation Organization, (ICAO), the so-called “bible” of aviation, the ACRU should have been able to identify beforehand where to source these equipment – or private companies that possess these cranes to be called on emergencies such as those that happened to the 66-ton Xiamen Airways B737.
These companies should have been enlisted long ago and covered by official agreements with them. In this way, they are ready and able to respond to such a situation such as lifting a 150-ton aircraft or for that matter a B747, in time.
What if a 150-ton airplane, or the likes of a B747 gets disabled at the NAIA runway? God forbid.
According to ICAO, the ACRU personnel should be trained abroad to deal with these complicated aircraft recovery operation. These chosen personnel, following their training either in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia or the United States, should now be able to operate these aircraft recovery equipment without any difficulty.
However, this Xiamen Air accident called for equally important expertise that we found wanting from our NAIA people supposed to be equipped with such set of skills.
Following this incident, the NAIA authorities should also conduct a post-mortem, inviting all aviation experts and stakeholders to determine where the ACRU system went wrong and what could be done so that this fiasco would not and should not be repeated in the future.
Using the words of Department of Transportation (DOTr) Secretary Arthur Tugade, the incident was an “eye-opener” for all Philippine government officials. Do we take it to mean as Tugade’s public admission that he has been sleeping on his job and that it was only after this incident that he woke up from his deep slumber?
Tugade’s “eye-opener” quip was the cruelest thing to say the very least. After all these time, these government agencies will have to shed light on why it took them such a long while to bring to normalcy the chaotic situation caused by the Xiamen plane skidding incident at the NAIA runway.
It has been more than two years since he took over as the Secretary of the Department that supervises the NAIA, the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA), and the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP). Reporting directly to the DOTr Secretary are MIAA General Manager Ed Monreal and CAAP Director General Jim Sydiongco.
While busy with extricating the plane, anybody manning the posts when around 60 flights of various airlines, including the four recovery flights of Xiamen Airways, reportedly went through our air space unregulated?
Meanwhile, thousands of passengers got stranded and crammed at the airports without food, water or information about getting their flights.
Tugade, Monreal, Sydiongco and other concerned officials of the DOTr, the MIAA, NAIA, CAAP and the rest of alphabet agencies will be given their opportunity in today’s public hearing called by Sen. Grace Poe as chairperson of the Senate committee on public services to shed light on what went wrong other than Mother Nature’s fault on this Xiamen incident.
According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), Metro Manila’s population of 25 million means that the country requires an airport with a capacity to handle 100 million passengers. Designed for a capacity of only 30 million passengers per year, NAIA’s passenger volume reported having processed 40 million in 2017.
If space restriction is preventing NAIA from being developed into a multi-runway hub, IATA has recommended another site must be found in close proximity to Metro Manila. A medium-term plan is to fully develop the former Clark US Airbase in Angeles City, Pampanga – which is about two hours drive to Manila – as a secondary airport for now.
The P700-billion airport project in Bulacan being pushed by San Miguel Corp. will take a longer time before being turned into reality.
Perhaps, an airport with two runways could be built and expanded at existing NAIA right here, right now.
Until the government decides what is the most viable option, NAIA is living up to its tag as one of the “worst” airports in the world for its failure in attending to basic needs of affected passengers.