‘The good news is that yesterday morning the queues were gone. Travelers were moving fast past Immigration officers at about five minutes maximum per passenger.’
I WOKE up early yesterday morning in order to get to NAIA Terminal 3 while the angels were still asleep.
Actually, I hardly slept at all, in fact doing odds and ends at home until finally at 2:30 a.m. Sunday I caught two hours of shuteye.
But by 4:30 a.m. I was up and about and prepared to head to the airport which very recently has been the subject of social media posts detailing the horror of waiting two hours and longer to get through Immigration. I didn’t want to experience that, hence my super early bird arrival at Terminal 3.
But I wasn’t really early. When I got to counters 16-30 for All Nippon Airways (ANA), there was already a long line of economy class passengers snaking outside the B counters (they weren’t open yet) and a mercifully shorter line for business class. The counters opened at exactly 6:30 and by 6:40 I was checked in.
What was amazing is that by 6:50 I had cleared Immigration.
That’s ten minutes in line.
Then again, there were a few flights leaving early that morning. There’s a Singapore Airlines (SQ) to Singapore, a Cathay (CX) to Hong Kong, an Emirates, and my ANA flight.
So that’s about four or five wide-bodied jets (I think I missed another) with about 300 passengers each or a total of some 1,200-1,500 passengers. Maybe that’s a manageable number for NAIA 3. Or maybe many passengers (like me) were willing to arrive three hours ahead of flight time just to get everything done and get settled at the departure gate or the airline lounge.
Whatever the reason, I and my fellow early birds were spared the horror of a long queue at Immigration. Pwede pala.
But can they keep it up? Or will ningas-cogon rear its ugly head?
I am not surprised no one from either House of Congress has called for an inquiry into the plight of travelers going out of and coming into our country. You can guess why: because many of these folks use a special VIP lane to clear Immigration and Customs so they could be on their merry ways as soon as possible.
When the highest policy makers of our country become so alienated from the daily struggles of the ordinary people, this is what happens. Soviet-era dissident and former Czechoslovakia president Vaclav Havel had warned about that in one of his speeches to his people in that euphoric period after the Soviet Union collapsed. And when leaders get alienated, imagine the erroneous policies and programs a government could enact as a result.
Or the lack of new or corrective policies for that matter.
Didn’t the President and some senators do an ocular of our airports recently, in response to the January 1 airport radar snafu which left our country vulnerable to outsiders? I don’t know how an ocular could have identified for them the issue with the radar, but for sure it didn’t highlight for them the long Immigration queues — which they never go through anyway.
The good news is that yesterday morning the queues were gone. Travelers were moving fast past Immigration officers at about five minutes maximum per passenger.
For how long? Maybe not even God knows. But let’s see.
It seems that all it took was a social media uproar. Now, we are learning!
