BAGUIO CITY – President Macapagal-Arroyo will no longer pursue the closure of the Loakan airport, which she had earlier intended because it had not been hosting enough commercial flights since 1990.

Strong winds and fog that cover Baguio, especially during the rainy season, have forced major commercial airlines to stop flying here. Only Asian Spirit serves the city.

“Many factories want to locate in Baguio and they need flat land, but we hear the cry of our leaders of the Cordillera…Don’t close the airport yet,’ “ the President said in a speech before members of the administration parties Lakas-CMD and Kabalikat ng Malayang Pilipino (Kampi) in the Cordillera on Friday. She witnessed the merger of the Cordillera chapters of Lakas and Kampi.

The airport is near the Baguio City Economic Zone and its closure would have opened up lands for the zone’s expansion, Ms Arroyo said.

Mayor Reinaldo Bautista Jr. said he had already offered Malacañang a proposal to build new economic zones in nearby Sablan and Tuba. These towns were actually identified as expansion sites of a metropolitan government called BLIST (Baguio and the Benguet towns of La Trinidad, Itogon, Sablan and Tuba), which was designed by urban management experts shortly after the city was devastated by the July 1990 earthquake.

Sablan, in particular, is suited for industrial firms, Bautista said, because of its relatively flat terrain.

The mayor began convincing Sablan to free up an area for such a zone in January.

Last year, Ms Arroyo floated the idea of converting the idle Loakan runway into an extension of the economic zone administered by the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza) last year.

She noted that the airport had stood idle for too long, and might no longer be necessary now that an airport in La Union had been scheduled to begin operations this month.

The airport inside the Bases Conversion and Development Authority’s Poro Point Special Economic Zone in San Fernando City, 45 kilometers from here, was modernized and upgraded last year.

Loakan has been the city’s only airport since 1932, but Ms Arroyo said its runway is ideal for an expansion of the facilities of Texas Instruments Philippines Inc.

Ms Arroyo said the La Union airport would already serve Loakan.