MANILA – It does look like the customary seasonal airport congestion at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport will remain customary, as airport management authorities disclosed Monday that a new modern air traffic radar won’t be deployed in time for the Christmas holidays.
At a Senate inquiry, legislators tried to ferret out the reasons for flight and passenger processing delays, and one of the major pain points of flight traffic delays was that a modern satellite-based system, called the Communications, Navigation, Surveillance / Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM), which was supposed to come online in October 2017, won’t become operational until 2018.
Furthermore, according to NAIA General Manager Eddie Monreal, while there is no overarching plan to increase seasonal manpower to cope with the additional traffic this Christmas holiday, all x-ray machines at the arrival concourses are operational.
But there is a program to add another 500 immigration tellers to improve throughput and processing capacity.
In addition, Monreal pointed out, the per-airline x-ray machine assignments have been done away with, so that passengers can freely choose where they want to have their luggage checked, instead of having to put up with occasional long queues at the check-in inspection stations.
This means that, whatever shapes up at the airport this Christmas crunch, passengers will have to grin and bear it until it is hoped, next year.
