One of the negative issues leveled at the Aquino administration’s candidate in the 2016 Presidential election—which apparently figured prominently in the defeat of former Secretary of Transportation and Communication Mar Roxas —was the extreme slowness of government decision-making on the projects encompassed by the PPP (public-private partnership) program. This came to be known as analysis-paralysis: too much analysis resulting in paralyzed decision-making.
One of the victims of analysis paralysis has been one of this country’s most urgently needed infrastructural facilities: an international airport capable of handling the 140 million passengers expected to use its facilities by 2035. During President P-Noy Aquino’s time in office, discussions on that subject centered around two airports, namely, Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) and Macapagal International Airport (also known as Clark International Airport). The two-part solution to the burgeoning-NAIA-traffic problem was to expand NAIA and improve the accessibility of Clark International Airport to Metro Manila. During the Aquino administration there was some alleviation of the NAIA part of the problem —the reacquired NAIA Terminal 3 and the renovated NAIA 1 were placed in full service—but solution was found for the Clark accessibility problem. Clark remained insufficiently accessible.
Today the scope of discussions of enhancement of the principal air gateway to this country has widened to include two proposals for alternatives to NAIA and Clark. One proposal is that of All-Asia Resources and Reclamation Corporation (ARRC), a consortium led by Henry Sy and Wilson Tieng. The other proposal is that of conglomerate San Miguel Corporation (SMC). Thus, there are now four cards on the gateway-improvement table.
Both of the new players, being financially powerful, have put forward very impressive proposals. ARRC’s P1.3 trillion project seeks to reclaim 2,500 hectares at Sangley Point (Cavite) for a facility designed to handle 90 million passengers annually. The P700 million SMC proposal involves the installation of six runways on 2,500 hectares of reclaimed Bulacan land. ARRC says that its facility will be operational in 4-5 years.
The Sy-Tieng and SMC proposals are serious and are merely awaiting government approval. But the Duterte administration, now eight months in office, has not yet done anything substantive about them. They’re on the table, waiting to be seriously discussed. CAPA Center for Aviation, an aviation industry think tank, said recently that the Duterte administration is “moving slowly” in the matter of an alternative airport.
The root cause of the inaction is that successive administrations have been wedded, not entirely without reason, to the idea of NAIA having been the main air gateway to this country. Indeed, the PPP project is for NAIA’s expansion, not the installation of a new airport. The latest development is that the PPP NAIA project has been put on hold, the explanation being that the government wants first to draw up a Comprehensive Luzon Gateway Master Plan. Goodness knows how long such a plan will take to produce.
Although some airlines have agreed to use Clark as the hub of their Philippine operations, NAIA remains the preference of most airlines flying into and out the Philippines. The government clearly would like Clark to take the pressure off Clark, but it has no choice but to focus on NAIA for as long as there is no rapid-transit (translation: railway) connection between Clark and Metro Manila. Speaking realistically, such a connection cannot be expected to be in place anytime soon.
Pressure on the government—the Duterte administration—to resolve the principal-air-gateway issue without further delay comes from two sources. One is that NAIA’s capacity is becoming more overstretched by the day. Whereas they have a total design capacity of 3i million passengers per annum, the airport’s three terminals handled 39.5 million passengers in 2016. The other source of pressure is long lead time for the completion of the Sy-Tieng and SMC projects. Four to five years is a realistic estimate for such completion—if the Duterte administration makes up its mind without further delay.
There has been too much analysis-paralysis. The term has come for decision-action.
