Of lousy airports and incompetent airlines
The Department of Transportation, we are sorry to say, is the weakest link in the Duterte administration. This administration is almost halfway in its six-year term. The Duterte Cabinet and its so-called technocrats can no longer blame former secretaries like Joseph Emilio Abaya and Mar Roxas under the PNoy government. The many inadequacies driven largely by incompetence and ineptitude of the officials and technical people in the transport sector under the current administration should take responsibility for the mess in land, sea, and air transportation. For this column, I would rather focus on air transport.
The first problem is the size of transports in relation to volumes of travelers each day. If indeed the past administrations did not accurately project the number of airplane passengers, then this government should have taken immediate initiative in expanding the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, considering the adjoining hundreds of hectares of land which used to be occupied by the defunct Nayong Pilipino is unoccupied, a non-performing asset which some officials had the temerity to lease for 75 years to allegedly build a casino complex. Then there is Villamor Air Base which could be relocated to the golf course of some military installations. Transport sector officials are either shortsighted or are sleeping on their jobs.
One or two runways are definitely not enough to service Terminals 1 to 4. Flights from other parts of the country are purposely told to delay their take-offs because NAIAcould does not have enough space. The next problem is the overcrowded, disorganized, dirty, and poorly-managed airports, not just NAIA. There are simply too many food outlets and souvenir shops that are not arranged in an orderly manner. The men and women who man the boarding, security checks, and other services are not well-trained and do not have the proper attitude to make passengers feel they are being helped.
Even employees of airline companies are incompetent, not really customer-oriented. They do not manifest concern for passengers, especially during flight delays (which happen more often than not). The manner by which these personnel deal with passengers is often peremptory, even mechanical. The way they announce flight delays, the tone of their voice when they give the hackneyed “your turn-around aircraft is delayed” as if the airline company is always not at fault for such delays. They do not even assist seniors and PWDs who have no more seats while others are just putting their bags on the pre-departure seats. The evidence of neglect, lack of concern and “bahala na” are all over the airport terminals. One has to be blind, deaf, or plainly uncaring not to see the blatant display of incompetence and ineptitude.
I have seen with my own eyes the many foreign guests as well as locals who openly lambast the kind of airport airline managements we have. One has to be blind, deaf, or totally uncaring not to be able to see the mess we have every day in our airports all over the land. The DOTr Secretary, his undersecretaries, and all airport managers should be ashamed of themselves. The least they can do is to take a one-way flight to Timbuktu and never return.