Thailand’s Airport mess; Lessons for NAIA III

An article appeared last week in Singapore’s Straits Times by Bangkok correspondent Nirman Ghosh entitled "How a 5-Star Dream Turned Into a 3-Star Nightmare," giving readers an update of the travails of Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport.

Inaugurated only last September, nine days after former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted from power by a military coup, the new airport boasted of having the world’s largest single terminal and the world’s tallest control tower. But only two weeks after the airport opened cracks were found in the runways, the taxiways and the passenger terminal itself.

Moreover, Ghosh writes, "On the first full day of operations on Sept. 25 last year, the US$1-billion baggage scanning system failed. Computers hung, and over 200 soldiers were rushed in to lug baggage. Even now, about 50 passengers a day are injured by the ungainly baggage trolleys.

"A frantic effort is under way to build more toilets because there are not enough of them. Signage is non-existent or inadequate. The floor is difficult to keep clean, the fabled glass panels impossible to maintain. Interior layouts are impractical and confusing.

"The duty-free concessionaire King Power occupies some 36,000 sq. m., well over the 25,000 sq. m. specified in its contract. That has squeezed passengers to less space, creating serious congestion in a terminal designed for 45 million passengers a year and already handling around 40 million. (The) contract contains no penalty clauses for exceeding allotted space, so there is nothing to be done."

For perspective, Suvarnabhumi cost US$4 billion, or about P200 billion. The head of the team from the Airports of Thailand (AOT) investigating the problems says that for that money, the country was supposed to get "a five-star airport" but instead got a "three-star" facility which, I assume, he finds unacceptable.

In fairness to Thaksin, Ghosh notes, the new airport had been on the drawing boards since the 1960s, "but no prime minister before Mr. Thaksin Shinawatra had managed to get the project done." But, he adds, "achieving the dream came at a cost, because he rushed it as one of his showcase projects."

No one dared to speak up to tell Thaksin they were not ready, Ghosh quotes the chief investigator as complaining. But, it must also be said, neither did anybody dare to tell the generals who opened the airport anyway after Thaksin had been thrown out.

As usual, there are charges that the airport construction had been tainted by corruption. The chief investigator estimates that of the US$4 billion it cost to build the airport, up to 30 percent may have been skimmed off by politicians. He alleges that the corrupt politicians took their ill-gotten gains from the country.

"They didn’t have to go to the British Virgin Islands," the official claims, "they could go to another small island nearby," obviously referring to Singapore. "The politicians would travel there in the morning and return in the evening, and use the money they put there in the stock market in Thailand."

If true, I guess he’s saying the politicians, in a classic money-laundering scheme, used companies in Singapore or co-mingled the funds with other investments to hide their participation. Great|! Now all he has to do is prove it. For his part, Thaksin has been claiming, from Beijing where he reportedly spends most of his time, or from Tokyo where Time magazine interviewed him last week, that charges of corruption against him and his government are "baseless." At any rate, Thaksin concedes to Time, "corruption will not go away in Thailand – it’s in the system."

Investigators also claim shortcuts in the construction of the facility. Ghosh noted the cracks in the runways, taxiways and terminal building. The chief investigator suspects that "corners were cut in filling the airport’s wetland site with the costly special grade of sand required to stabilize it." His agents are now drilling for soil samples to analyze.

Because of the runway and taxiway cracks, international inspectors have refused to certify the airport as safe. However, the AOT insists the cracks do not present a safety hazard. Although even Thailand’s Directorate of Civil Aviation has withheld safety certification, Ghosh reports that other airports in Thailand and around the world operate without similar certification. Airlines continue to bring in hordes of tourists and businessmen to Bangkok.

Ghosh reports that a management shakeup is now underway in the ATO. A "rising star in Thailand’s military pantheon," Gen. Saprang Kalayanamitr, is taking over as the new chairman of the airport authority board and, Ghosh gushes, will bring in "his brand of decisiveness and precision to the organization."

The experience of Suvarnabhumi should be a cautionary note for our own NAIA III which has not opened yet, but has already been subjected to enough controversies and crises to throw off the most optimistic and starry-eyed tourism advocate.

For instance, NAIA III, it is said, will already be obsolete even before it opens. It allegedly isn’t modern enough or big enough, especially when compared to giant facilities in the region such as Singapore’s expanding Chiangi or, for that matter, Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi when it finally gets its act together which, in the nature of things in Thailand, it will, eventually.

There are also allegations of graft in the construction of NAIA III. That, I suppose, is par for the course in a construction as huge, for our standards, as the new international airport. Airports, as Thailand’s experience also shows, seem to attract the vermin among trapos who see those projects as gold mines to be sacked and looted.

Still, we’ve got to start somewhere. If we plan to be a player in the highly competitive, almost cut-throat, field of regional tourism, we won’t get into the game until we fix up the very first local facilities tourists see upon arriving in the country.

Not only do we have to have a world-class airport facility in Manila and other major destinations in the country such as Cebu, we have to think of sprucing up the accesses to and from those airports. I never cease, for instance, to be amazed by how Singapore has cleaned and greened the approaches to Chiangi, no matter how small the land area the city-state has for all its needs.

Perhaps Singapore is too advanced a country to be compared to us? That’s our problem: Either we think too small, or we assume that talking big is the equivalent of getting things done.