Airmageddon

We should have built a new airport years ago. But we did not. We should have taken the decision in July 1989 after a Philippine Airlines overshot the NAIA runway and ploughed into the busy South Luzon Expressway, killing 8 people pinned in their vehicles. Some 87 of the passengers on the plane were injured.

That incident tells us the country’s premier international airport is a disaster waiting to happen. It sits right in the middle of a bustling metropolis. It has only a single runaway, forcing planes to circle too long overhead waiting for the opportunity to land. It forces everyone to accept a shorter headway between landings and takeoff, creating its own perils. The congestion in Manila spread to the country’s other airports where flights are delayed until cleared to land.

There are any number of reasons why the obvious decision to build a new airport was not taken years ago. We have a notoriously short planning horizon preventing us from anticipating (and addressing) problems further down the road. Our bureaucracy tends to be imagination-challenged. No bureaucrat gets promoted solving a problem that will emerge 30 years ahead.

Then there are the costs. In the wake of the debt crisis, government could not afford to build large infra during the last three decades. Our conglomerates did not have the financial muscle to undertake the task.

Therefore, all we did was apply superficial solutions. Even if we did not increase runway capacity, we went on building new terminals. Each terminal was cut off from the other by congested roads.

To this day, the authorities are still thinking in terms of building yet another terminal for the Manila airport. Doing the same thing all over again yet expecting a different result falls squarely into Einstein’s definition of madness. The only comfort the new terminal will bring is added space for stranded air passengers to huddle in while they grapple with the uncertainty of when they might finally fly.

Over the last weekend, the Manila airport was shut down nearly two days when a Xiamen Air plane slid off the runway after landing. Hundreds of flights were backed up. Incoming passengers were dumped at the Clark and Cebu airports. Some international flights were forced to unload passengers as far away as Saigon.

Days after the airport finally reopened, flights were still backed up. Hundreds of passengers were huddled in airports all over waiting for the chance to fly to Manila. The Manila terminals were filled to the brim with stranded passengers huddled like refugees from some tragic war.

A single plane sliding off the runway shut down the country’s premier airport. The cost of the incident could run into the billions. The misery that caused is incalculable.

We do not know if this incident will finally spur our unimaginative bureaucracy to finally act on the problem. We can only hope they will.

Runways

We need new runways. Here are the facts. Even with a fourth terminal, the Manila Airport can only serve (with no new accident happening) 37 million passengers. By 2020, passenger volume is estimated at 49 million. By 2030, the Manila Airport will need to serve 77 million.

With its limited runway capacity, the Manila Airport can only accommodate 45 movements per hour. As early as 2015, actual demand was already at 55 movements per hour.

The Department of Tourism plans to increase tourist arrivals by two million this year. That will require 27 additional flights (or four movements) per day. That in turn translates into five additional aircraft movements per hour. That simply cannot be done with one runway.

I suppose we will have to ask foreign visitors to come by boat. But then there is the other problem of port congestion.

With a GDP growth of six percent (conservatively), there will be 1.5 million additional air passengers this year. Domestic traffic alone will require 27 additional aircraft movements per day.

By 2022, when President Duterte’s term ends, the Manila Airport will need 103 additional aircraft movements per hour over the present capacity of 45 movements. That single runway will be more congested than Edsa.

Experts have estimated annual losses of P1.1 billion for airlines due to delays. By 2020, these losses will increase to P3.8 billion. Passenger productivity losses are estimated at P2.8 billion. By 2020, the losses spike to P11 billion.

The Manila Airport now carries among the highest risk globally. Runway constraints prevent changes in the taxiway layout. The challenges to connectivity are obvious.

The Singapore airport, with three runways, accommodates 135 movements an hour. The upgraded TokyoHaneda airport accommodates 110 movements on its four runways. Manila, with its 45 aircraft movements an hour ranks with Myanmar’s airport and only better than Cambodia and Laos. But these other countries are doing something to address capacity constraints.

A decade ago, the country’s only conglomerate with the financial muscle to get it done, proposed building a modern airport along the Bulacan coastline. The new facility will have four runways and a lot more land to spare for building a new metropolitan center.

If this project was allowed to go through then, none of the airport shutdowns we experienced would have happened. The San Miguel-financed airport project, to be built with no funding from government, is designed to handle 200 million passengers a year with state-ofthe-art terminals.

The Arroyo administration, in 2008, began studying the proposal. The notoriously do-nothing Noynoy administration did nothing. Today, oligarchic interests are continuing to block construction of the only possible solution to our Airmageddon.