No-fly zone

It was embarrassing to explain to our Singaporean friends how the Philippines became a no-fly zone on New Year’s Day. There was no war nor invasion by a hostile country going on.

Yet, some 56,000 passengers in over 300 flights were stranded in various airports in the country and in the region.

A screenshot of an online flight tracker showed no planes over the Philippines. Not even the overflights. A failure of the country’s flight control system caused the problem.

Initially, reports blame power failure. But Meralco clarified they had no line problems and the problem was internal to CAAP facilities.

In a press conference, CAAP officials admitted as much. Jacque Manabat of ABS-CBN who covered the event reports Transport Secretary Jimmy Bautista blamed two causes: first the primary cause was a problem with the power supply and the degraded uninterrupted power supply (UPS), which had no link to the commercial power and had to be connected to the latter manually.

Second was the power surge that fried the equipment,  resulting in the prolonged outage of the flight control system.

Apparently, both the UPS and the back-up power system didn’t function as they should have. These are not complex technical equipment. Many of us use this equipment even with our home computers.

Indeed, we plug our computers to the UPS, to protect us from power interruptions and surge. That’s why it is called uninterruptible power supply or UPS. The UPS fails when we have neglected its maintenance or it is beyond its expected service life.

It gets worse. Reports now say that “the technicians in charge of the P11 billion CNS/ATM plugged into Meralco’s 380-volt power line (which it uses in the so-called three-phase power for heavy electricity users, such as airports with their 24/7 massive air conditioners, to the CNS/ATM system that uses only 220 volts.

One of my colleagues commented: “I don’t know how they could have done that. The 380V is a three-line system. 220V is two lines. If you plug these two lines into two of the three lines you get 220V.”

Another one wondered: “They probably didn’t have a voltage regulator/surge protector when they re-powered bypassing the UPS. That’s basic.”

It gets complicated for an air traffic control system because the whole system goes down if it loses power even for a second. Then, it takes time to bring it back up to speed.

The general suspicion is that CAAP didn’t maintain its power systems properly. And to top that, made a stupid mistake that exposed sensitive equipment to a power surge.

CAAP had no choice but to admit that NAIA management is not to blame. This is CAAP’s responsibility.

It is not the relatively new air navigation system that failed. But CAAP is blaming the technology behind their CNS (Communication, Navigation, and Surveillance). CAAP claims it is already outdated.

DOTr Secretary Jimmy Bautista told reporters: “If you will compare us with Singapore, for one, there is a big difference, they are at least 10 years ahead of us.”

Sec. Jimmy may be correct. But the present CNS system wouldn’t have failed if CAAP technicians didn’t make those mistakes. The catastrophic breakdown could have been prevented if the UPS was properly maintained and they didn’t plug directly to the wrong voltage socket.

They should also regularly check if the redundancy measures in place work. In the condo where I live, the back-up generators are always tested to make sure power is delivered within five seconds of a Meralco power outage.

CAAP says they already recommended creating a back-up system to test equipment before it fails. Why wasn’t this done by the previous administration?

For something as critical as our air traffic control system, those back up equipment should always be ready.

Claiming that the existing facilities are outdated is just an excuse. Even the best facilities will falter without proper maintenance and if improperly operated.

 At least Sec Jimmy realized “This is [an] air traffic management system issue.” May I add, it is also a serious national security issue.

Imagine for a moment that a neighbor wants to invade the Philippines. The first thing they could do is to simply paralyze our air traffic control system. In seconds, the whole country is a no-fly zone. They could at the same time paralyze our national power grid, which they control.

I am not a technical person, but I think they ought to review the present system that places control for the entire country in one small building at the CAAP compound near NAIA.

We could still have one control system as we have it now in Manila. But it should be possible to have two or three alternative control centers that can set up if Manila fails.

We should have the capability to reroute flights to Clark or Mactan last January 1. We need a better system. Didn’t JICA think of this when they funded the project?

We ought to understand that we need a failsafe system that will not isolate us from the world. What happened is worse than third world.

Of course, equipment is one thing. Trained personnel who are paid properly is another. We are probably already losing trained and experienced traffic controllers because government salary scales cannot compete with foreign offers.

In the end, there was probably negligence on the part of the Duterte administration. Something like this doesn’t happen overnight. There must be something Duterte and Tugade neglected to do.

Sec. Jimmy and Capt Skee have just been six months on the job and it is unfair for them to take all the blame. The technical staff should have flagged the problem early.

We have a poor maintenance ethic. We use equipment until they break down. One NAIA GM once wondered why maintenance was needed after the airport’s power system failed.

That’s why I am not a fan of having nuclear power plants. Our bahala na attitude on maintenance is a problem.

Let us see how fast our government moves to fix the problems that paralyzed our aviation industry on the worst possible day. Once out of the headlines, bureaucrats will start sleeping on the job again.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco