Airport ‘revamp’ in the offing, again
Credit to Author: BEN KRITZ, TMT| Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2019 16:24:11 +0000
HAVING just lately promised that commuters will be able to travel from Cubao to Makati “in five minutes” within six months, President Rodrigo Duterte has set his sights on “revamping” The Ninoy Aquino International Airport, after making a “surprise inspection” of it on Monday.
Presidential spokesman Sal Panelo did not share many details about the visit, but it was apparently prompted by the President’s frustration with the litany of public complaints about severe congestion at the airport. Air traffic is routinely snarled, leading to more canceled and delayed flights, and the experience of navigating Naia’s terminal facilities is now only a little less dehumanizing than standing in line at Disneyland.
None of this is news, of course; Naia has been an outdated dump for at least a decade, and has only risen above being deemed the worst airport in the world over the past two years because a few other countries have found ways to make their airports even more awful. Most people in this country believe, probably correctly, that the best way to “revamp” Naia would be with a bulldozer, and that the only reason that hasn’t happened yet is because the government has spent the past 20 years being either unwilling or incapable of developing a useful alternative.
The prospects of that happening now seem a little better with some progress being made toward establishing a new airport in Bulacan, but the current administration has otherwise been no more effective than its predecessors. If the vague suggestions divulged by Mr. Panelo are any indication, there is little reason to hope that Naia will improve any time soon.
During his visit to the airport, Duterte offered an apology to passengers for the constant delays and said the government would find some means to address them within a month. Nevertheless, there are apparently only two semi-solid ideas being considered by the administration at the moment, neither of which will do much to address the airport’s critical overcrowding. First, the president’s own takeaway from his visit was that airport security should be managed by a single agency, “either from the military or civilian force,” according to Panelo. Second, the Department of Transportation is “discussing” a plan to shift general aviation and some domestic flights to the airbase at Sangley Point in Cavite City, which Duterte has said should be operational by November.
The implication of placing responsibility for airport security under a single agency is that the agency would not be the Manila International Airport Authority, with the further implication of that being that the current managers of the MIAA probably should be updating their resumes. If all this actually means Duterte is considering recruiting an experienced airport operator from elsewhere to take over management of Naia, it could result in substantial improvements in ground side operations, though it would obviously take many months for the arrangement to bear fruit. If on the other hand Duterte is simply proposing to do what he (and every other president before him) has usually done in response to agency underperformance and replace the MIAA leadership with the most conveniently available political apparatchiks, there will be no noticeable improvement.
Diverting some air traffic to Sangley Point without some massive infrastructure development being carried out to support it will probably cause more problems than it solves, and turn out to be a short-lived experiment. Only a very small proportion of Naia’s current traffic is general aviation; moving it is not necessarily a bad idea, but it would not help to relieve congestion in any substantial way.
A bigger problem is domestic commercial flights. The runway at Sangley can only safely accommodate smaller planes, but could at least relieve Naia of this traffic. Access to the airport, however, is another story. DoTr Secretary Arthur Tugade, who is fond of unusual modes of transportation, has proposed linking the airport to the Mall of Asia by ferry, which is feasible for passenger traffic, but does nothing for cargo traffic. Road access to Cavite City, which crosses a neck of land that is 130 feet wide at its narrowest point, is a complete nightmare as it is, even without the airport in operation. Unless another road is provided, which would have to built on a causeway across a couple of kilometers of the bay, Sangley Point is utterly useless to businesses who rely on short-haul air cargo to deliver goods to and from Manila and other parts of the country.
The fact that the president applied his usual bluster to the all-to-obvious problems at Naia will satisfy his most ardent supporters that “something is being done,” but unless Duterte has a substantial surprise up his sleeve this time, there is not likely to be any visible change.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
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