Mactan International Airport revisited

Now as an 80-year-old native Cebuano retiree and once as an obscure employee (1991-98) til my compulsory retirement from the corporate management services and business department (cmsbdd) of the MCIAA (Mactan-Cebu International Airport Authority), the GOCC tasked to operate and manage the pivotal “Cebu’s gateway to-from the world” – the Mactan-Cebu International Airport (MCIA) - since the airport’s conversion from just an agency then known as the Mactan International Airport (MIA) under the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) of DOTC (Department of Transportation and Communication) into a chartered GOCC effective Dec. 18, 1990(?), I am one among the inconsequential few millions of Cebuanos and residents who feel happy reading and hearing the news that there are a number of domestic and even international groups interested to bid in the government’s multi-billion peso effort for the “overdue” yet imperative repair/renovation/expansion of our overgrown erstwhile employment “alma mater.”  And help operate and manage it (?).  Under PNoy’s PPP program.  Not the Patay-Patay Party of old!  But thru the Public-Private Partnership scheme.  

The nutshell of this envisioned “big ticket” airport project having been already substantially explained by MCIAA’s present and able GM Engr. Nigel Paul Villarete, what our revisit will attempt to add are vignettes of some past circumstances surrounding the airport culled from my already dimming remembrances, that the younger generation of air travelling Cebuanos/ prospective investors/retirees/balikbayans, among others, may yet be interested to know for whatever positive purpose it may serve them.

Item:  I can still recall that during my high school days (1948-52) the headbashers of then Pres. E. Quirino and Cebu governor S. Osmeña, Jr., who were bruited to be “planning” for the putting up of the hardly-doable at that point in time in RP of an a-la Manhattan (New York)-style Mactan-Mandaue suspension bridge (the first) and the transfer of the Lahug (Cebu City) airport to Mactan island, naively asking critically:  “Unsa may ilang patugpahon diha sa Mactan, salindanaw?”  Shades of their corollary gullible imagery:  “Asa kaha na sila manguha’g hilabihan kadaghan kaayong kawayan nga tagikon anang ilang gidamgong taytayan nga magdugtong sa Mactan ug Mandaue?”  They must be turning in their graves by now seeing what has become of their imagined “salindanaw airport” and “kawayan bridge”!

Item:  Thence surfaced sometime later the matter of putting up of an alternate (second) runway – said to be as costly, if not more, than the existing one – as a precautionary diversionary measure in the event of any untoward aircraft take-off/landing accident that may immobilize the aircraft at any part of the runway thereby temporarily blocking MCIA’s main and only runway.  We were told that there was this “near logical” idea of just “improving” the only taxiway – a cheaper and more realizable alternative, it was argued – as a temporary “diversion runway” there being no more available extra vacant land space at the airport.  Another proposal, (originally (?) floated by then airport GM Capt. Boy Oppus, a native of Bohol) was for the establishment of the “alternate international airport” in the developing tourists resort island of Panglao, just across Tagbilaran City of Bohol.  Into which will also be transferred the bruited not-so-ideally-situated (?) Tagbilaran City airport.  Prompting a wag to “suggest” that perhaps upon the latter’s realization, MCIA shall be better renamed into:  MCPBIA – for “Mactan-Cebu Panglao-Bohol International Airport”!

Whatever, we Cebuanos, actual and even “armchair” (like me) travelers, expats present and prospective investors/retirees/balikbayans/etc. in this what is claimed as the “richest” province in the country, are better reminded that our “modest” Mactan island international airport “replication” of such  well known, ideally island-constructed international airports as Chep Lap Kuok (Hongkong), Chang Yeh (Singapore), Narita (Japan), Penang (Malaysia) is a very strategically located pivotal regional gateway, providentially less prone to monsoon typhoons and flooding, within the 2-4 hours flight (passengers and high-end cargoes) to-from aforecited international hubs, to all other BIMP-EAGA (Brunei-Indonesia-Malaysia-Phil. East Asia Growth Area) destinations, and beyond such time, to the rest of the world! [email protected]