SNAFU in the Manila airspace

The shutdown of the Manila airspace last January 1 was a major disaster lasting four days. It affected 65,000 passengers with 350 airplanes diverted and cost the country easily ?1 billion in actual costs and opportunity losses. It was an unnecessary waste of resources, tourism revenues, and should be avoided for a country recovering from the pandemic and recession.

According to the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, the agency in charge of the Air Traffic Management System of the country, the cause was not the radar/sonar components but the power supply subsystem due to the failure of the Uninterruptible Power Supply and the circuit breaker. Unconfirmed reports said the 220V line was plugged to a 340V feed, causing failure. In any case, it was a systems failure with magnitude implications.

SNAFU is a derogatory acronym term used to describe organizations/nations always in trouble, where chaos is normal. It was originally used by the military in difficult situations but with optimism and bravado. Failed/failing states or countries that are always unstable politically and economically are also referred to as SNAFU.

System is a set of components working together as parts of a mechanism or a network organized for output. The parts are coordinated and integrated to achieve the goal. In our world, there are natural systems like the solar system and our bodily systems. Our skeletal, digestive, circulatory, and neural systems are God-given but advances in science and medicines have allowed some alterations to our bodily systems, but seem impossible in our solar system. Then, there are the designed systems, such as a computer system, information system, utility systems, and the social and political systems which are all supposed to be designed to improve our way of living. The system failure in the air traffic management is a failure of a designed system partly caused by our flawed political system that inputs unqualified, incompetent, and undesirable parts/persons into the system. While some may attribute the CAAP disaster as a series of unfortunate incidents, it is also a microcosm of the state of the Philippines political system.

Like the Air Traffic Management System, the Philippine political system should have a systems diagram, organizational structure, defined functions, responsibilities and accountabilities. There should be automatic feedback mechanisms and corrective actions. The component sub-systems and parts are well coordinated and integrated for the smooth functioning of the system, and its relations to other bigger systems defined. All of these should be in manuals/virtual guidelines that are regularly updated. We do not know whether the CAAP air traffic management system have all these in place or if they are just on ad-hoc basis, like the Philippine political system.

The Philippine economic system and development is closely tied to the political system. That we are behind Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam in economic development when we were ahead of them 20 years ago is indicative of SNAFU. This is also true of countries like Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Laos, Cambodia, and those whose political systems are also in disarray. While it is partly due to political ideology, in terms of the level of autocracy or democracy, it has more to do with the support of the political system to the free enterprise economic system. In both democratic and communistic governments, graft and corruption undermines the economic system and retards economic development.

Like in other designed physical systems, the more defective, substandard, and unusable the components, the greater the probability of failure in the political/social/economic system. The Philippine political system elects/appoints into the government many of this kind of components/people that it seems we are headed for a systems failure sooner or later if we do not correct and improve our political system.