Unpredictable

Imagine yourself at a provincial airport in the Visayas or Mindanao. A ground crew for your airline of choice announces:

“Ladies and gentlemen this is your final call for check-in, in order to secure your reserved seat. Please ignore the fact that we are way past our scheduled boarding time as well as the fact that our non-existent aircraft that is suppose to be on the tarmac is on another tarmac at another airport, full of passengers who have also been waiting for clearance to take off. That plane will be taking off shortly to cover the one and a half hour journey that will result in a total delay of two hours for you.

To complete your “Inconvenience package,” your pre-assigned Terminal has also been moved from terminal 3 to Terminal 2. You may catch the shuttle bus in order to retrieve your vehicles that are now inconveniently parked on the wrong side of the airport.  For those of you who have missed business appointments, connecting flights, or graduation ceremonies, Better luck next time. Mabuhay! It’s More Fun in the Philippines!

Except for poking fun at an otherwise infuriating incident, the flight delays and terminal swaps did happen to us last Saturday afternoon as we flew from Tacloban to Manila. The fact of the matter is almost all the flights we’ve taken out of Manila have been delayed by 50 minutes on average ON the runway.  Apparently Secretary Art Tugade and his boys at the CAAP and NAIA are all “Ningas Cogon.” When they took over, the delays were minimized while all the new Airport Manager managed to make a good show of cleaning up the terminals of scam artists and petty criminals. But now they are back in the open, especially at night and regulars at the airport blame it all on the Airport police Department. Sadly, Typhoon Tugade has run out of wind and thunder dissolving into an LPA: Low Powered Authority.

The tragedy is that those in government past and present treat the problem of such delays as a technical inconvenience and operational limitation. They even throw in the problem of poor funding. But has anyone of these jokers as well as those in Congress ever studied how many BILLIONS of Pesos are lost daily and annually because of our Air traffic congestions and delays? If “we” are losing P2.6 billion daily due to traffic on EDSA, what then would be the cost to the Philippine economy in terms of lost revenues, undelivered goods and services, operational delays for companies and executives as well as direct loses to the airline industry?

I don’t recall anyone asking this question ever, but it is time we do raise the question because thousands of Filipinos are directly affected everyday. The second question is what happened to Team Tugade? Why did they lose steam and why are the problems back in our friendly skies? If you did it then, why can’t you do it now?

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“People would easily if not readily comply with rules if they actually know what the rules are and if the rule makers followed their own rules” this is the regular comment of airline passengers who find themselves unwilling participants in a “Simon Says..” game whenever they go through security checks at the many airports in the Philippines.

I don’t know how often Secretary Art Tugade travels by air or visits many airports but I doubt very much if he even notices the fact that only one out of three X-Ray machines in most airports are used on a daily basis. I observed this many times at the NAIA Terminal 3 and several provincial airports many of which I have gone through almost every week. Why inconvenience passengers by making them go through long lines when there are other machines?

Secretary Tugade should also explain why the CAAP and OTS always changes the rules when going through the X-Ray? One day they tell you remove your shoes, most days they don’t. In all our domestic flights we were never asked to remove Laptops from our bags, then suddenly an OTS screener at the Tacloban airport tells us to remove the Laptops and remove them from their carry cases. A couple of elderly people were dumbfounded when they were required to remove pen light batteries from a gadget and the batteries confiscated. They did not ask the same from me.

What puzzled me was that the OTS screener asked if I had an extension cord in my bag? This is something no one ever asked during the nearly weekly flights I’ve been doing lately. As a matter of fact I do carry a multi-socket extension cord for hotels that scrimp on outlets making it nearly impossible to charge phones, computers and write columns. Then the OTS asked: How long is the cord? Apparently the cord was not long enough to tie up the flight crew or set-up a phone charging station during the flight so he let me through! Excuse my language but who gives a shit how long the cord was? This screener was either suffering from an Obsessive-Compulsive disorder or was power-tripping hoping to get noticed or recognized for going through each and every personal effect of passengers unmindful of the long line of passengers he was creating.

If the DOTr – CAAP and OTS want to do their job right, go ahead and do it but do it with uniformity, consistency and predictability. It should not be based on the Obsessive-Compulsive condition of a screener or the laziness of others. Whenever I ask why the procedure or rules are different at every airport, the instant reply is that the screeners at NAIA must be lazy because they all have the same rules! So now, “Laziness” has become an official explanation for the mess during security checks.

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