Gordon urges gov’t to outsource emergency equipment at Naia

Senator Richard Gordon on Tuesday urged the government to outsource dedicated emergency equipment at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) to immediately clear any interruption caused by aircraft crashes.

Gordon made the statement in response to the chaos that gripped Naia last week after a Xiamen Air passenger plane skidded off the airport’s main runway.

READ: Xiamen Air jet stuck at NAIA runway; flights canceled, diverted

The proposal, according to the senator, takes some lessons from a similar fiasco in 1995 when a Taiwan-bound China Airlines Jet blocked the Naia runway on December 13 and international flights had to be diverted to the Subic Bay International Airport (SBIA), which at that time, had the most advanced radar and airport navigational aids in the country.

“We could have avoided or at least lessened damage, with vision and knowledge from the lessons taken in that similar fiasco in 1995, we could outsource dedicated emergency equipment at Naia to immediately remove any interruption caused by aircraft crashes from the runway,” Gordon said in a statement.

Earlier, the senator also emphasized the urgent reopening of SBIA as an alternate airport, adding that he has already appropriated P553 million from the 2017 General Appropriations Act for the restoration of facilities and procurement of digital radar systems and instrument landing systems, among others.

Gordon, a former mayor of Olongapo City and founding chairman of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA), has been pushing for the completion of the rehabilitation of the Subic airport so it could return to full operation by the second quarter of 2019. /ee

READ: SBMA hastens equipment upgrade to revive Subic airport