Marcos apologizes over Philippine airspace outage
MANILA, Philippines — President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. apologized Friday over the technical failure that took the entire Philippine airspace offline just in time for the New Year’s Day travel rush affecting at least 56,000 passengers.
“I’m sorry. Of course, we have to apologize to our countrymen, especially those who came from abroad because their vacation time is limited,” Marcos told reporters partly in Filipino after inspecting the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
“We’re asking for your forgiveness, but we are doing everything so that this does not happen again,” he added.
These were his first public statement on the massive disruption in all the country's airports, which happened five days ago.
Among the measures that the government has taken, Marcos said, is the emergency procurement of two uninterruptible power supply units. The failure of both the main and backup UPS was among the reasons airport authorities gave for the airspace shutdown.
The president added that they are planning to install backups for the system, although he admitted that this may take a “little time” but will be fast-tracked.
Transport officials had expected that the Communications, Navigation and Surveillance/Air Traffic Management system, which they claimed was “outdated,” to conk out and had discussed installing backups for it, but these talks were not acted on.
Still, Marcos said officials “have done everything to return operations back to normal.”
“Considering how big the problem was, I think our airport authorities, our Cabinet secretaries … have done a reasonably good time and six hours was rather a short time considering how much needed to be done to get the system back up in working condition,” he said.
Airport officials said the main UPS of the CNS/ATM failed at around 9:49 a.m. after its cooling blower failed. A backup UPS should have kicked in, but he said “for some reason” it also failed to function.
They said this prompted CAAP engineers to connect to the commercial line instead, but this supposedly led to more equipment failing as the commercial line supplied power at 380 volts, when the system can only handle 220 volts.
- Latest
- Trending
