If you were one of those who failed to fly out of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) on New Year’s Day, do not blame yourself, because it was not due to your own fault, and neither to the other 53,000 airline passengers who suffered the same sad and shocking situation.
So near and yet so far, you must have felt —and you could be forgiven for thinking of an unhappy ending for those you thought were responsible for a bad start to a new year.
The culprit, it turns out, was an outdated air traffic management system.
According to the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, the technology behind the Communications, Navigation and Surveillance Systems for Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) of the Philippine Air Traffic Management Center was planned in the late 1990s, but completed only in 2019.
By today’s standards, therefore, the system is already outdated, the agency said.
The CNS/ATM is the system used by air traffic controllers to direct air traffic within the country’s airspace.
The system, worth a whopping P10.8 billion, was completed in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency and was intended to boost the safety within the Manila flight information region.
Here’s what happened, according to news reports.
That Sunday morning, one of the cooling blowers of the CNS/ATM failed, leading to the shutdown of the uninterruptible power supply.
Switching to the use of backup power through a generator also failed after the second UPS malfunctioned.
Engineers tried to override the power supply by installing an automatic voltage regulator instead, but the system suffered an overvoltage.
As a result, several key components, including the very small aperture terminal, a set of satellite dishes used for communication, navigation, and data computation, also went kaput.
If the system was already outdated, the power outage and loss of communication that affected all operations at the Philippine Air Traffic Management Center was not totally unexpected; in fact it was inevitable.
But should the blame fall on the previous leadership of the Department of Transportation that had jurisdiction over the matter during its time?
That’s what some senators want to find out by asking for an investigation in aid of legislation on the unforeseen power outage in the country’s air traffic control system.
A former CAAP chief is also quoted in news reports as saying that the agency had “unqualified personnel.”
But former senator Panfilo Lacson does not want to wait for an investigation and lays the blame squarely on the DOTr: “Stupidity or greed? If reports are accurate that the budget appropriated by Congress for the setup of redundancies in the air traffic control system was diverted to some beautification projects at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, those responsible should spend their next holiday season in jail.”