For the nth time we need an NTSB office!

Today is the nth birthday of our dear friend, Mrs. Preciosa Soliven, the widow of my mentor, the late Sir Maximo V. Soliven. I have not seen her for some time now, but since we are Facebook friends with her daughter Sara Soliven de Guzman, I get to see her photographs every now and then. She has continued to age gracefully. I hope to find her well especially in this age of the coronavirus, which has all kept us imprisoned at home. God bless Preciosa and may you have more birthdays to come.

* * * Last Tuesday’s front-page news in The Philippine STAR showed a before and after photo of that Medevac crash last Monday evening, which turned out to be an Agusta WW Westwind Jet that I misidentified as a Cessna Citation 500 (maybe it was built under license to Agusta Corp.). That photo showed the final photo of Capt. Mario Medina taken in front of the plane, and the photo above showed the burned out hulk of the Agusta. It was very clear that the airplane did not crash or was turned into a twisted wreckage.

What does this tell us? That the aircraft must have hit something on the runway as it was taking off, hence it turned into a fireball and exploded and thus the plane never took off the runway. This air accident reminded me of the infamous Air France flight 4590, a Concorde supersonic airplane that crashed in Gonesse, a suburb of Paris, on July 25, 2000 after a fiery takeoff at the Charles de Gaulle International Airport 20 years ago.

The burning Concorde went down in flames almost immediately after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and four others on the ground. It was the first fatal crash of a Concorde in 24 years of regular passenger service. I was lucky enough that a few years later, I joined an aviation conference in Atlanta, Georgia on Foreign Object Debris (FOD) present in so many airports and our principal speaker was the chief of the crash investigation of the Concorde crash. It turns out that the Concorde wheels hit a 12-ft metallic strip shaped in an “S” form and burst the tires so close to the plane’s wing which carries its fuel.

I suspect that the Lion Air jet must have hit something that caused it to burn and explode. Truth to tell, watching air crash investigations episodes and documentaries are my passion… and yes, except for the Concorde crash, no other air crash investigation talks about an airplane crashing while on takeoff.

This also reminds me of the recent helicopter crash last Mar. 5, where a Philippine National Police Bell 429 carrying PNP Chief Archie Gamboa and 7 other PNP officers flew from its landing site in San Pedro, Laguna and crashed. I saw two video footages of the helicopter taking off, creating a huge plume of ash cloud from the recent Taal Volcano eruption. Suddenly the chopper veered left, though it has not yet really taken off at the right altitude, which is why the chopper hit a power line and crashed. So, was it a pilot error? Let’s wait for the PNP investigation to make that decision.

Meanwhile, for the nth time, Congress should have enacted a law creating the National Transportation Safety Board because most western nations already have their own version of this. I have been writing and asking Congress for this and up to now it is still a proposal. This should be prioritized when Congress returns after Holy week and hopefully when this COVID-19 issue is over.

* * * An issue surfaced yesterday that caused confusion in the Office of Cebu Gov. Gwen F. Garcia and the Mactan Cebu International Airport Authority (MCIAA) under General Manager Steve Dicdican and the Department of Tourism (DOT) under Regional Director Shalimar Hofer Tamano. The Governor really wanted Cebuanos to be protected under the present lockdown of the entire province of Cebu and the Metro Cebu cities.

Apparently many stranded tourists arrived in MCIAA perhaps awaiting their ferry flights out of the Philippines. What got the Governor’s gall was that these tourists arrived in MCIAA with their ferry flights not yet ready… so they were booked in hotels or resorts in Mactan because there were no other facilities in the airport. The Governor complained that this effort was not coordinated through her office.

She called me to say that the DOT of the local LGUs had their airports to ferry their tourists. Bacolod is an international airport so is Caticlan in Boracay. She complained…why send these tourists to Mactan, thus threatening the lives of Cebuanos who are under lockdown mode at this time. Let me say that national gov’t offices should coordinate with Gov. Gwen. * * * Email: vsbobita@gmail.com