“Even if this light-bulb moment had come too late, after the airport had been hit with electrical crashes, it should be treated as an urgent request. Every time Naia is hit with a blackout, the nation gets a black eye,” he said.
But according to Recto, “if the promised power system audit would validate that request, then [the] government should buy it, but not necessarily in the amount floated. Panic buying is the number one procurement sin.”On New Year’s Day, a technical glitch due to a power outage caused the Communications, Navigation and Surveillance/Air Traffic Management system to go offline, resulting in the shutdown of the country’s airspace.
To give way to the replacement of the faulty UPS, the country’s airspace will again shut down on May 17, between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. Bryan Co, MIAA senior assistant general manager, said the maintenance activity had been coordinated last week to give airline companies enough “lead time” to fix flight schedules and inform passengers.
“These are all proactive efforts to make sure that the CNS/ATM is reliable as an offshoot of what happened earlier this year,” Co said, referring to the Jan. 1 aviation mess that affected around 56,000 passengers and 361 domestic and international flights to and from Manila.Subscribe to our daily newsletter