MANILA, Philippines — The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines cannot investigate itself over the New Year's Day outage of its air traffic management system, Sen. Grace Poe said Sunday as she urged CAAP Director General Manuel Tamayo to inhibit from proceedings.
In an interview on Super Radyo DZBB on Sunday, Poe also mentioned the proposed Philippine Transportation Safety Board whose creation Congress had approved but that President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. for supposedly duplicating the functions of existing government agencies.
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"When there is a transportation accident, for example, involving buses that are too old to have been given franchises, it should not be the Land Transporation Franchising and Regulatory Board that investigates that," she said, adding this should be done by an independent body.
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"And here, the CAAP is being investigated by itself," Poe, chair of the the Senate public services committee and who led a hearing last week into the outage, said.
Poe said that Tamayo should not be involved in the CAAP's internal investigation into the outage that saw Philippine airspace empty for several hours on January 1.
"I hope an independent body will be formed for the investigation and, definitely, Captain Tamayo should not be in that panel," Poe said.
Sen. Risa Hontiveros of the Senate minority also favored having an independent panel conduct the investigation.
"What if the negligence is from CAAP's end? There's a clear conflict of interest if they are investigating themselves. Not only that, they giving media information different from that they reported to the House. Perhaps we at the Senate should consider a different aviation body that could join the investigation," she said last Thursday.
The outage has been attributed to a faulty circuit breaker that made the uninterruptible power supply at the CAAP although investigators have yet to determine who was at fault.
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