‘Unless a new runway is built in Manila, I fear that a spanking new terminal with 50 gates will simply be a flight of fancy.’
THE last week or two have given frequent travelers into and out of Manila some reason for hope but don’t pop them champagne corks yet.
The announcement by SMC’s Ramon S. Ang that he will be building a new terminal where the decrepit building of the Philippine Village Hotel now stands means that soon we will have a brand-new terminal. Again. But it will be a spanking new one with 50 gates. Which, I suppose, will mean that arriving at or leaving from Manila will no longer be the “unforgettable” experience it is today.
The other day I saw some smart ass on Facebook post a question about the plan for a 50-gate terminal building on a property that is quite small. He even colored the area that the current Terminal 3 covers, to show how puny the space covered by the PVH is in comparison, asking how you can fit 50 gates into that small space whereas Terminal 3 itself has less than 30.
If you were to look at the map he included in his posts you have to grudgingly admit that the guy has a point (or two). Then again, RSA being RSA, I am sure he has an answer to that.
RSA is not a man wont to issue statements like that without any basis. So let’s see.
But over the many column pieces I’ve written complaining about the Manila airport complex I’ve been less concerned with the terminal buildings as I have been — and still are — with the fact that we have built four terminals in an area that has effectively only one real runway, the one which runs from
Manila Bay to the SLEX and from which aircraft larger than an Airbus A320 have to take off and land.
This one runway is the major cause of delays in air traffic in Manila, which has a domino effect on travel schedules around the rest of the country. It is why an aircraft arriving during “rush hour” sometimes has to spend from 10 to even almost 60 minutes circling over Manila awaiting clearance to land — which many times has defeated the purpose and benefit of early or even on-time arrivals on my travels to Manila.
Adding more gates at the NAIA complex without adding a second runway is doing exactly what our city planners have done in, say, Makati. When Makati was built in the 1960s and 1970s, all the streets were planned out (in Legazpi and Salcedo villages, for example) for buildings that were five-storeys to ten-storeys high. Today, the average height of buildings is twenty storeys — and yet the streets remain the same.
Voila! Traffic!
Unless a new runway is built in Manila, I fear that a spanking new terminal with 50 gates will simply be a flight of fancy.
Hoping to be proven wrong!
