SKEPTICAL senators were informed on Wednesday that the recurring inconvenience to inbound and outbound airline passengers forced to bear with frequent flight diversions at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) was caused by “defective” instrument landing system (ILS) at the Naia’s main runway.
Grilling Department of Transportation (DOTr) officials at a Senate budget hearing, senators learned that the $70-million ILS installed at the country’s main airport to provide precision guidance for safe approach and landing “has been nonoperational for the past one-year -and-a-half.”
Sen. Joseph Victor Ejercito said he also found out that a high-rise condominium recently built close to the airport perimeter “further complicated the problem.”
“Lately, I’ve been noticing the frequency of flight diversions. Even if there is no typhoon, and it is just raining or there is a monsoon rain, many flights have been diverted to Clark International Airport,” Ejercito said during the Senate Finance Committee hearing on the proposed 2017 budget of the DOTr
The senator added: “I found out recently that the ILS of Runway 24 is broken and has not been in use for more than a year. Another problem that aggravated this is a condominium situated at C-5, and is obstructing
the flight path.”
Transport officials, under questioning by senators, admitted that the ILS used to guide inbound flights landing at Runway 24 has not been repaired since it conked out in 2015, even as spare parts have been ordered from a foreign supplier, but not expected to be delivered until October.
At the same time, Ejercito said he further learned the twin problems “forced pilots to adjust the minimum decision altitude, an aviation term used when deciding when to push through or abort a plane’s landing.”
“Before, when our ILS was operating, the minimum decision altitude was 300 meters. Now, because of the condominium, the altitude was raised to 900 meters. There is no danger in this, because 900 meters is the pilots’ safety adjustment for landing. But the repercussion is that we lose millions, if not billions, whenever our pilots have a hard time estimating their landing, resulting to flight diversions to Clark.
We are wasting fuel, time and other resources expended for the flight, plus the passengers’ inconvenience,” he noted.
Ejercito asserted at the hearing that all these inconvenience could have been avoided, “if the government would invest for an ILS for the country’s main airport, and also if the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines would no longer permit the construction of high infrastructure, such as the condominium named as Cypress Towers, that would block the planned course of aircraft.”