SEN. Joseph Victor Ejercito yesterday chided the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) for the slow upgrade of the country’s airports and its failure to back-up the air traffic management system (ATMS) of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport despite funds allocated by Congress.
Ejercito said senators have been defending the upgrade allocation of the Department of Transportation (DOTr) and its attached agencies, including the CAAP, for the past two administration and it was “disappointing” that the improvements have been slow.
“All of the things they have asked for — government support, subsidy, airport upgrades, equipment, navigational tools, and everything, lalo na ‘yung mga (especially the) night flying capability of other airports — we already gave them. That’s why a lot of airports were already upgraded,” Ejercito said.
“Doon ako nalulungkot (That is where I am disappointed). Of all things that they have requested, why the main air traffic management system, how come na dito pa tayo pumalya (we failed here)?” he added.
“It has to be perfect, almost perfect. In other countries, there are, sometimes, they have three layers. So, if the first system fails, the backup fails, there’s a third one. That’s why there’s really no compromise. We cannot compromise,” he also said.
Ejercito said the “slow pace” of upgrading the country’s airports is not acceptable.
The senator recalled that in 2018, during his first term in the Senate, efforts to improve the country’s ATMS and its communication, navigation, and surveillance management system received a P122 million funding, which was on top of the P10 billion grant received from overseas development assistance at the time.
Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista on Wednesday said he will hold aviation officials accountable for the breakdown of the ATMS that subsequently shutdown Manila’s airspace to the rest of the country and the world for hours on New Year’s Day.
He also assured that the DOTr is doing everything it can to prevent similar incidents from happening as the aviation equipment are now being evaluated to determine if they will have to be replaced or upgraded soon.
He said the DOTr will upgrade CAAP’s electrical equipment to make sure that the mess will not happen again.
Bautista has earlier said that the main cause of the technical glitch was the power supply problem and the degraded uninterrupted power supply (UPS) which had no link to the commercial power being supplied by the Manila Electric Company. The second problem, he added, was the power surge which affected the equipment due to the power outage.
CAAP director Manuel Tamayo said the airport’s current Communications, Navigation and Surveillance Systems for Air Traffic Management (CNS-ATM), which was funded under a Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) loan, which was installed in 2010 and completed in 2018 is already outdated.
