Marcos officials blame Duterte administration for colossal boos at airport

[ad_1]

A sarcastic post on Reddit.

This is the view President Marcos Jr.’s airport officials, particularly his Secretary of Transportation Jaime Bautista, are using to explain the unprecedented closure of Philippine airspace on New Year’s Day, which led to the cancellation of flights to and from Manila, stranding 60,000 passengers.

They claimed that the National Communications, Navigation and Surveillance System for Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) had collapsed because both of its power supplies had failed, it was a old system.

What actually happened was an incredible howl: airport technicians plugged the 220-volt system into a 380-volt power line, damaging it.

Still, Bautista’s explanation was absurd; he claimed that the CNS/ATM system that the previous Duterte administration had purchased and installed was obsolete.

Get the latest news delivered to your inbox

Sign up for the Manila Times daily newsletters

By registering with an email address, I acknowledge that I have read and accept the terms of use and the privacy policy.

But the 11 billion peso system did not become fully operational until 2019, which Duterte rushed after bureaucratic delays since 2010. The system was funded and overseen by the Japan International Cooperation Agreement (JICA). The purchase agreement for the system also provided for regular updating of its software and hardware, to bring it to a state-of-the-art level.

Unlike the old traffic control system which used ground-based radars, the system works by sending satellite signals to aircraft transponders and using the transmissions from the transponders to determine the precise locations of aircraft in the sky.

Bautista therefore claims that the Duterte administration, in particular its Secretary of Transport, Arthur Tugade, who had very closely supervised the completion of the project and the start of operations in 2019, installed not only an updated system, but a faulty system.

They plugged it into the wrong power line. Posting to Facebook using an app that displays international aircraft flights. FROM FACEBOOK POST USING AN APP THAT SHOWS INTERNATIONAL AIRLINE FLIGHTS

Stupid

Bautista says in so many words that Duterte and Tugade were stupid enough to buy 11 billion pesos for a system that became useless in three years. That’s less than the four-year average usability of iMacs I’ve used.

I don’t think Bautista knows what a CNS/ATM system is. Instead of using expensive ground-based radar, the system works by sending satellite signals to aircraft transponders and using the transmissions from the transponders to determine the precise location of aircraft in the sky. Like most software-based equipment, they are regularly updated to extend their usability until entirely new technology is invented.

Bautista claims that JICA, which has financed and supervised similar projects between them, in Shanghai, Tajikistan, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, tricked the Duterte administration into borrowing billions of pesos to buy a system became obsolete even before he started paying the loan.

The reality is that Bautista is lying to cover up a colossal mess of the system by him and his staff in operating the system. Having been president of PAL for a decade, he should also have asked for extra precautions to keep the system running during the holidays, especially on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, which he did not.

He should either resign or at least take some time off until an authoritative investigative body, such as a Senate Public Service Committee, determines what really happened on New Year’s Day. .

Error

Bautista himself partly inadvertently revealed the huge mistake made by the personnel operating the system that shut him down:

“The root cause identified was a degraded power supply and UPS issue that was unrelated to the commercial power supply and had to be connected to it manually,” he said. “The secondary issue was the power surge that caused the power outage affecting the equipment,” he added. (Mine in italics.)

Below is Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) Director General Manuel Tamayo’s detailed explanation of the boo-boo, as reported by the Manila Bulletin in its January 1 issue. Laugh or cry, I bet you will:

“Tamayo explained that the power supply is not really the main issue because they have two main sources of electricity to run NAIA’s operations, commercial electricity from Meralco and the emergency generator which has the capacity to operate the equipment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The problem, he said, was that the power outage and resulting surge affected the equipment used by the NAIA for the CNS/ATM system.

“The operation of CNS/ATM is primarily dependent on commercial power supply and is supported by backup generators, which are actually part of the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) design which is meant to ensure that the entire operation will not fail.”

“What happened was that when one of the power sources failed (as a result of the blackout), the commercial and standby generator power eventually failed. powered the system,” Tamayo said.

Blowers

Tamayo said troubleshooting needed to be done and the initial result was that one of the UPS fans issued a warning and eventually shut down. It happened at 9:49

“Supposedly there shouldn’t be any issues as it’s supposed to be fail-safe thanks to two UPS systems. But for some reason the other inverter didn’t come online, so some troubleshooting had to be done,” Tamayo said.

He said CAAP staff then bypassed the collapsed inverter to reconnect power to the backup generator. This resulted in System Restore.

But at 12:18 p.m., Tamayo said, CAAP staff watched for an overvoltage indication: “So instead of getting 220 volts, what happened was 380 volts, so they immediately shut down the system to avoid overvoltage. ‘other damage to equipment.’

“Unfortunately there was already damage in the affected system and the worst part was that it was affecting our VSAT.” (VSAT stands for “Very Small Aperture” Terminal and is a two-way ground station that transmits and receives data from satellites. It is the disc that serves as a receiver for satellite navigation or communication and all the necessary data we need),” Tamayo said.

2020V only

In short, what happened is what many of us foolishly did when decades ago it was popular to bring American devices from abroad. The most impatient of the family plugged them into the Meralco 220 volt outlet, when they only needed 110 volts. Broken device.

As Tamayo himself recounted, during this incident the technicians in charge of the 11 billion peso CNS/ATM hooked up Meralco’s 380-volt power line (which it uses in the so-called three-phase power supply for large electricity consumers, such as airports with their massive 24/7 air conditioners) to the CNS/ATM system which only uses 220 volts.

Bautista and Tamayo were using technical language to deceive us. It wasn’t a power surge, it was a bad power line they plugged the system into.

Isn’t it amazing? PLDT senior executive Manuel Pangilinan, whose flight from Tokyo to Manila was interrupted due to the shutdown, played down what happened when he tweeted: “[Six] unnecessary flight hours, but the inconvenience to travelers and the loss to tourism and business are appalling. Only in the PH. Sigh.”

Questions

Tamayo, however, could not answer the questions that obviously should have been asked to clarify his statements:

1. Didn’t the suppliers of the P11 billion navigation system put a warning label like I do in my USA made gadgets that it can only use 220 volts, not 380 volts?

2. If it was a Meralco line that they used to get power, no one knew that Meralco lines use 380 volts for heavy power users, and they should have used that gadget P400 that my electrician uses, for example, to determine the voltage of a socket before an electrical device is plugged into it?

3. If it was a generator they used to restore power, didn’t they use a P800 voltage regulator and surge protector, the kind you can buy from Ace or True Value that I I use to protect my P50 000 desk from power fluctuations?

4. How can an 11 billion peso system fail simply because of its faulty electricity suppliers? At that price, shouldn’t they have installed a set of generators, not just two?

I said you’d laugh or cry about that airport disaster.

Yet, despite all these almost hilarious sores, what does Bautista propose to prevent another closure of our airspace? “We need 13 billion pesos to modernize the country’s air traffic management system.”

Unbelievable. Not a few of the 60,000 who suffered through hell on New Year’s Day would have liked to see Bautista and Tamayo hanging from the ceiling of the airport concourse with electric cables.

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

Twitter: @bobitiglao

Archives: www.rigobertotiglao.com

Book orders: www.rigobertoticlao.com/shop

[ad_2]