Airport interrupted-2

So all’s well, that ends well? Again? The regular electricity supply is back on stream running to normal operations at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Passenger Terminal (NAIA-3) in Pasay City. Although backed by generator sets, these were not enough to keep the NAIA-3 in full operations last Monday.

Without any weather disturbance in the wee hours of the morning last Monday, the NAIA-3 was hit by a blackout. Co-inciding with Labor Day, more than 40 domestic and international flights were either delayed or cancelled. Affected were about 9,000 passengers of airlines using NAIA-3, many of whom travelled in and out of Metro Manila during the long weekend national holiday.

Thankfully, the speedy repair crew of the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) resolved the issue of defective circuit breaker at NAIA-3. It saved the rest of the day to restore normal power supply at NAIA-3. It was reportedly interrupted for a few minutes again later in the afternoon but electricity quickly kicked in back again.

But this is beginning to become a bad habit in our airport services. With no storm condition to disrupt the power supply, the electricity service conked out during peak travel season in our country. And it happened not just once but twice in a row less than half a year apart.

It happened the first time at the surge of local and foreign travels on New Year’s day last Jan.1 this year. The power surge disrupted the airport radar system. This caused the shutting down of the country’s air space for nearly the whole day. More than 300 flights and about 56,000 of foreign and local travelers, mostly overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who came home to spend the Christmas holidays here, got stuck in various airports.

This triggered huge investigations on concerned officials and personnel of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) conducted by various government agencies. Subsequent “inquries in aid of legislation” were likewise initiated by the Senate as well as by the House of Representatives. As it turned out from these different probes, two units of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) conked out. The UPS system serves as the standby and redundant supply for electricity in case of unforeseen power outage for whatever reasons, whether due to natural or man-made causes.

The Jan.1 airport shutdown took place two days before the state visit to China of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (PBBM). Last Monday’s NAIA-3 blackout happened a day after PBBM flew to the United States.

In both incidents, all eyes turned to the CAAP. As created by law, the CAAP regulates and supervises the operations of NAIA Passenger Terminals 1, 2 and 3, and 43 other domestic and international airports all over the country. But in the middle of all this seeming “series of unfortunate events” (to borrow from a Hollywood movie title) is the Department of Transportation (DOTr). As soon as he arrived in Washington, PBBM issued directives to DOTr Secretary Jaime Bautista to resolve immediately the NAIA-3 power outage.

After all, the DOTr Secretary is the immediate supervisor of the CAAP, the NAIA, the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA), and all other government agencies in charge of transport-related services as well as those operated by the private sector.

The soft-spoken DOTr Secretary is no longer ruling out the possible “sabotage” angle of this latest incident.

Once burned, twice shy as the saying goes, the DOTr has asked the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA) to step into the investigations. For the meantime, Bautista called for a “full electrical audit” of the entire NAIA-3 complex that services mostly the flights of the Cebu Pacific airline company.

Meanwhile, the Philippine Airlines (PAL) issued advisories to all its passengers on the adjustment of flights that were scheduled for yesterday and today. The country’s flag carrier adjusted several of their international and domestic flights “to give way to the government’s scheduled maintenance work on the Philippine radar system.” The PAL further explained “the government is undertaking this preventive maintenance work as part of a permanent upgrading and improvement of the country’s air navigational systems.”

On another advisory yesterday, the MIAA announced it will shut down the Philippine air space on May 17 from 12 midnight to 6 o’ clock in the morning to replace the UPS system that have failed last Jan.1. Thus, all domestic and international airline companies are now re-adjusting their flight schedules. This is to minimize inconveniences to their respective passengers and more importantly, to the potential impact to their individual airline companies.

What is common though as root cause of these two successive airport interruptions were due to power outage. I am no engineer but methinks those electricity-run machines obviously react to unstable source of power supply. In the power outages that hit our airports, without bad weather situation or extraordinary circumstances, the outage could be due to an apparent insufficient supply of power from the electricity distribution grids.

Speaking of electricity distribution grids, the same power supply situation has also been causing long hours of blackouts in Occidental Mindoro, Guimaras, Panay and Negros. As far as it was explained to him obviously by government energy officials, PBBM declared the power outages in these provinces were caused by problems in the distribution system, not in the supply of electricity.

But with the early onset in our country of the long dry spell – called as the El Niño phenomenon – the electricity supply coming from our hydro-electric plants consequently run under reduced capacity. In an interview on board PR 001 last Sunday, PBBM conceded the power outage is a consequence of the warm weather. However, PBBM argued the government is trying to manage both water and power consumption.

In the meantime though, we might not see the end yet of airport interruptions. We just had airport interrupted-2.