Traffic Congestion

SOWHO gets the blame this time? I was scheduled to fly to Manila last Wednesday, taking the PAL Express 12: 30 noontime flight. Guess what? Because of PAL’s delays, my estimated time of arrival at the Terminal II stretched from 1: 40 to 4: 20 p.m.

The first cause of delay was by PAL’s admission to change one aircraft with another. When we finally boarded at 2: 10, we had to wait for another 45 minutes inside the plane. What gives for the long wait?

According to the pilot, the waiting game was due to traffic congestion at the NAIA. Same excuses as before. But this time, I blame not PAL, not even the management of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport ( NAIA), I blame the P-Noy administration for dragging its feet on infrastructure development.

Another airline that gets the heat on flight delays is Cebu Pacific. It said the government must ease runway congestion at the ( NAIA) that had been causing flight delays for thousands of passengers.

“The traveling public has been experiencing air traffic congestion in Manila, and both the government and airlines have been taking several proactive steps to minimize this,” Cebu Pacific vice president for marketing and distribution Candice Iyog once said.

“As the airline industry grows, it is very important to plan ahead to be at par with other international airports,” she added.

Veteran investigative journalist Raissa Robles concurs. On her blog, she points out that NAIA has only two runways -- the longer one ( 3,737 m) for planes as large as A380 and a secondary runway ( 2,258 m), mainly for local flights.

Ms. Robles asked, “Waiting for your plane? That’s still tolerable. What isn’t tolerable are the following frightening statistics.”

During peak hours, takeoffs and landings are less than a minute apart; sometimes, there are 36 landings per hour -- or landings less than two minutes apart. Or as many as 45 landings per hour -- or one landing every 80 seconds. Passengers bound for Manila are in effect waiting for collision accidents to happen.

Here’s more. International passenger traffic in the Philippines last year rose at its slowest pace in three years mostly because of congestion at the NAIA, said the Civil Aeronautics Board ( CAB).

CAB data showed that international passenger traffic grew by 6.8 to 16.74 million in 2012 from 15.67 million the year before. CAB executive director Carmelo Arcilla blamed the slowdown on NAIA’s limited capacity to handle traffic.

“It was deterred by infrastructure limitations,” he said.

NAIA’s runway can accommodate an average of 36 takeoffs and landings an hour, but actual scheduled commercial and general aviation flights, including fish runs, went to as high as 50 events in the summer of last year, causing congestion and delayed flights.

NAIA’s runways were built when the Philippine Airlines was a public monopoly. With deregulation, other airlines mushroomed. But previous administration including the incumbent failed to keep track of the increased air traffic.

Department of Transportation and Communications data bear this out. The fleet of commercial airlines using NAIA doubled to 119 from only 62 in 2008.

The Department of Tourism insists it’s more fun in the Philippines. It wants to lure in more foreign tourists to visit places in the Philippines. From the scowls from the tourists among my fellow passengers, there’s nothing fun to get stranded in the country’s airports.