President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Friday apologized to passengers affected by 282 delayed, cancelled, and diverted flights on New Year’s Day due to a technical glitch in the airport navigation system of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP).
“I’m sorry. We, of course, we have to apologize to our kababayans who, especially those who came from abroad because their vacation was limited—they lost two, three days (because of the disruptions),” Mr. Marcos said in a press conference after inspecting the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal 3.
“We know that to Filipinos, the Christmas holiday is very valuable. That’s why we are all asking for your forgiveness. We will do everything so this is not repeated,” added the President, who just came from a three-day state visit to China.
He said all forms of assistance have been given to the passengers affected during the ordeal.
“We did not just leave them alone or left them to their own devices. But we try to support them in every way,” the President said.
Airports have returned to their normal operations after the delays and cancellations of flights, Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista said Thursday.
“Right now, we already have normal operations in our airports and we have not seen any problems,” Bautista told GMA News.
Bautista, however, said they are not ruling out sabotage as one of the possibilities behind what happened.
“We are considering that because all possibilities should be included for consideration,” he said.
According to Bautista, the Department of Transportation is ready to face the Senate investigation.
“We are ready. We are now preparing the report and will submit the documents that they would require from us,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Immigration (BI) reported an increase in departures following the technical glitch experienced on New Year’s Day.
According to BI Port Operations Divisions Chief Lawyer Carlos Capulong, a total of 19,010 travelers departed on January 1, 2023.
The number jumped to 41,757 the following day, and the BI continued to process around 34-37k travelers per day over the next few days.
Before facing the media, Mr. Marcos heard a situation briefing by the Department of Transportation led by Secretary Jimmy Bautista on what caused the aviation mess and what has been done to resolve the issue.
“The problem was not just the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) it’s in another, it was in another unit. It was a circuit breaker that somehow did not reduce the incoming voltage, so the UPS saw it was too high and would ruin the machine, so it shut down. That’s what happened,” he noted
During the meeting, Mr. Marcos instructed Transportation officials to make sure a similar incident will not happen again.
All equipment to ensure “future redundancies” should be secured, he said.
“As I told Sec. Jimmy, we need to make sure that we fast-track all of—whatever negotiations we have with our—with the equipment suppliers who can help us with the upgrades, who can help us with the upgrades for the software and the hardware of our equipment,” the President said.
“For the UPS, we did an emergency procurement and we are going to procure two units of UPS so we have a main and a backup,” he added.
Mr. Marcos recognized the efforts of the DoTr and its agencies in addressing the issue.
“I can say that considering how big the problem was, I think that our airport authorities, our Cabinet secretaries, and all those who were involved in returning the system back have done a reasonably good job at six hours is rather a short time considering how much needed to be done to get the system back up into working condition,” he said.
The Senate is set to hold an investigation into the disruptions.
BI Commissioner Norman Tansingco said they expect the numbers to increase as those travelers from cancelled flights are rebooked to new flights.
“Lines are observed at the immigration area during peak hours due to the increase in passengers following the holiday season and recovery of cancelled flights,” said Tansingco.
“While lines are expected both here and in other countries of destination, we can assure that they are expeditiously processed as our officers are in full force, and additional personnel have been deployed to serve as backup as needed to process the higher number of passengers,” he said.
In 2022, the BI processed a total of 6,132,332 passengers.
Topping the list of departures are Filipinos with 3,917,296, followed by Americans with 611,067 departing travelers. The number of South Koreans and Australians that departed were 424,193 and 128,859 respectively, while 119,807 Canadians departed on the same year.
