An airport in dire need of a fix
On May 1, as thousands of Filipinos ended the long weekend, Terminal 3 of the Manila international airport shut down due to a seven-hour power outage. Many flights were either delayed or cancelled, affecting an estimated 9,000 passengers. Investigators initially pointed to the tripping of the terminal’s main circuit breaker, due to either faulty wiring or a short circuit.
Last New Year’s Day something similar happened. Radios and radars at the airport’s air traffic management center went offline, also because of electrical problems. Most flights to the Philippines had to be put on hold, diverted, or told to return to their point of origin. An estimated 56,000 passengers traveling to or from the country were affected.
In September 2022, the international airport was also hit by a seven-hour power outage interrupting operations. At the time, an electrical audit was reportedly ordered, and airport authorities promised to provide enough generator sets to address future outages. Reports indicate that 16 international flights and 15 domestic flights were affected by the outage.
Three major power outages in eight months must be a record of sorts for the Manila airport, or for any international airport. And while I understand that power reserves are now thin because of the dry season, this was not the case in September 2022 and January 2023. Obviously, what needed to be done since September 2022 has not been done.
In late January, Philippine airspace was even closed for two hours to allow airport maintenance to replace the broken cooling fan of one of the power supplies. Another airspace shut down is scheduled for May 17, for about six hours, also for maintenance, but this time of the uninterrupted power supply (UPS) of the country’s air traffic management system. Maintenance activity was also scheduled yesterday at the air traffic management center, “to repair the Automatic Voltage Regulator, replace the UPS and upgrade the ATMS A/B power supply.”
It is bad enough that power outages and airport shutdowns have become commonplace at the country’s main international gateway in the last eight months. But there is something utterly wrong with a system where Philippine airspace will have to be shut down for as long as six hours just so maintenance activities can be conducted at the air traffic management center.
At the center of all this is Manila International Airport Authority general manager Cesar Chiong and Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista. On May 2, a day after the Terminal 3 outage, Chiong was preventively suspended for up to six months by the Office of the Ombudsman based on an anonymous complaint for alleged grave abuse of authority and misconduct when he reassigned 285 airport employees in less than a year. Also suspended was Chiong’s assistant general manager, Irene Montalbo.
Chiong said in press statement that the reassignments were intended to improve airport operations, and that he was confident he would be “vindicated and cleared in the end after I am allowed to present my side as a result of my vision and plan to improve airport efficiency and the financial standing of the authority.” Chiong claimed airport finances even improved under his watch, “without any government subsidy.”
Talk about bad timing. Just when leadership matters most in fixing airport infrastructure and operations. Is it simply coincidence that Chiong’s suspension notice was served now? I don’t know Chiong or Bautista personally, but there seems to be a lot happening behind the scenes at the international airport. More than meets the eye, for sure.
Secretary Bautista himself fueled the controversy when he told a media interview, “because this is the second time that it happened on a long weekend, I think you cannot really discount the possibility of having somebody do it to embarrass the government, or to prove that they have something that we should give in to.
“We’re not discounting the possibility that there might be sabotage. I hope it’s not. That’s the reason why we asked the other agencies to join us,” he said, referring to the joint committee of the Department of Transportation, Office of Transport Security, Manila International Airport Authority, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA), National Bureau of Investigation, and Philippine National Police.
He also belied earlier claims by investigators that the Terminal 3 outage was a “circuit breaker problem,” alleging that “it’s not a regular fault that entered the system of NAIA-Terminal 3.” Bautista also said, “a lot of angles [were being] considered by NICA.”
The thing is, sabotage or not, the airport situation may just force the President to kick out Chiong, and maybe Bautista.
The thing with the sabotage theory is that it cuts many ways. Bautista alleges it might be intended to embarrass the government. But to what end? What will such embarrassment benefit the perpetrators? Was it politically motivated? Again, to whose benefit? The administration’s critics? Possible, but not plausible.
The other theory is that the sabotage was intended by the perpetrators “to prove that they have something that we should give in to.” Does this mean then that Bautista or Chiong had been approached previously by people or groups with certain interests? Also, does this mean that the September 2022 and January 2023 incidents were also sabotage? Or do the perpetrators intended to embarrass particularly Bautista and Chiong for the President to kick them out?
The timing of the Terminal 3 outage is suspicious in the sense that it happened just a day before Chiong was served his suspension notice. Obviously, his detractors see this as a win. But it is also a concern how the Terminal 3 incident, and indirectly, the previous two incidents involving power supply issues, might be used to justify “emergency” terminal upgrades, including a P1-billion budget for the purchase of new generator sets for the airport.
“One of the problems is that there are areas in the airport where the temperature is quite warm because the existing power provided by the generator is not enough to support the whole operations of Terminal 3,” said Bautista. “We need to acquire more generators so that we can support the 100% power requirement of our Terminal 3… You know this terminal is a 25-year-old terminal.”
Airport assistant general manager Bryan Co also told a radio interview that airport authorities would need to secure the necessary budget and undergo procurement activities for the purchase of new generator sets before conducting a full electrical audit. This was after Secretary Bautista reportedly ordered a “full electrical audit” at the airport terminals. Bautista also said the last electrical audit was done sometime in 2017 and the recommendations from that audit were not implemented.
And this is where I get confused. Didn’t airport officials, after the September 2022 power outage, also order an electrical audit? Precisely to prevent an outage from happening again? What happened to that audit? Or was that just lip service? And why order another audit again now if one was actually done just eight months ago? What has changed since then? And didn’t airport officials promise in September to get enough generator sets to meet the airport’s emergency power requirements?
Moreover, shouldn’t the audit be done ahead of budgeting and procurement? The recommendations from six years ago may need updating, but they may be just as good now as they were in 2017. Ideally, we should start with the 2017 electrical audit and update it, considering the last three incidents involving power supply. Then, after updating the audit, terminal upgrades can be properly planned, budgeted, and requisitioned. Unfortunately, time is not on the public’s side. To pull off a quick but lasting fix, competent and effective leadership will matter.
Marvin Tort is a former managing editor of BusinessWorld, and a former chairman of the Philippine Press Council
