Long queues irk passengers at Clark airport

CLARK FREEPORT—With three overseas flights and two domestic trips leaving between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., the Clark International Airport (CIA) was bursting with almost 700 passengers Thursday.

But the line for international travelers was longer and slow, with passengers complaining of spending 40 minutes to more than an hour to make it past immigration check.

Some let out their anger on the two Bureau of Immigration (BI) officers working on this shift. A man, who said he was an Australian, fumed: “It’s been like this for two years. It needs fixing. You can’t make tourists come here.”

The officers, a man and a woman in their 40s, remained calm and did not answer back. Immigration personnel here work 12 hours per shift.

Victor Jose Luciano, Clark International Airport Corp. president and chief executive officer, said he would meet with Immigration Commissioner Ricardo David and ask for additional personnel to run the agency’s six counters at the airport here.

Lawyer Carlos Capulong, BI Clark head, confirmed the lack of personnel. “Some are undergoing retraining in our academy in Clark. We are also recruiting,” he said.

BI has 10 officers working on three shifts in counters that cater to an average of 20 international flights daily.

“The Clark airport has boomed without a doubt, and we need to catch up,” Capulong said.

Luciano said international and domestic passengers at CIA from Jan. 1 to April 30 reached 370,124, representing a 45-percent increase in the volume of passengers in the same period in 2011.

Some passengers take the CIA to avoid traffic jams leading to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Metro Manila, he said.

With the growth in the volume of passengers due to the operations of budget airlines here, the Tourism Infrastructure and Enterprise Zone Authority has assigned seven employees to accept travel tax payments.

The CIA, itself, has a lot of catching up to do. One of its X-ray machines had conked out three months ago while its escalator had stopped running on April 10.

The terminal has to be expanded, and bidding is due next week, said Luciano. Tonette Orejas, Inquirer Central Luzon