MANILA’S Centennial Terminal, otherwise known as NAIA Terminal 2, may be one of the more poorly-designed international air terminals anywhere in Southeast Asia. How this terminal building got to be built the way it was escapes me, given the fact that the Estrada and Ramos administrations had many smart people on board who could have and should have had some say in its final look.
To think that when it was being built, we were boasting that it was being designed by the same designers responsible for Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport. (Or was it Orly? Now I can’t remember and I’m too tamad to Google.). For me at least, that raised my expectations.
But here’s why I make the bold claim that NAIA 2 is one of the more poorly designed.
If you have ever arrived at the Iloilo Airport, or at the NAIA Terminal 3, you will notice, if you’re particular about airports, that arrivals go through a different passageway than departing passengers. At Iloilo, from the gate and air bridge you take a ramp downwards at the end of which you are met by health monitors before descending one more level to baggage claim. At Terminal 3, you walk through a door and you get to an arrival corridor that will lead you all the way to the escalators down to baggage claim. But at Terminal 2 you walk through the same passageway that departing passengers take to other gates — necessitating delaying boarding for some flights to avoid mixing departing passengers with arrivals.
‘Think about it: if our leaders end up living a life of privilege… how can we honestly expect them to understand our plight and put in place the programs and processes and even infrastructure that make life easier for the rest of us?’
That’s world class design?
But that’s a minor beef for me. I am more critical of the fact that NAIA 2, like the older NAIA 1, was designed with open air parking. In a country whose weather is either too humid or too wet.
Open air parking? Really?
At least at NAIA 1, there’s a covered walkway to bring you from the arrival area to where your car or greeters are waiting. But at NAIA 2? You walk under the sky and if you happen to be there during a torrential downpour, good luck.
“Saksakan ng bobo” is how I’d describe the people who approved this design.
Then again, maybe they really weren’t “bobo.” Maybe their problem is that they were privileged. Privileged to never have to worry about where to park, and about having to walk to and from the parking area to the air terminal, because they were privileged — privileged to be driven to and from the airport, maybe privileged even never to have to line up for X-ray checks or immigration checks.
I know many people who fit this mold. If these are the people who have to approve the designs of such things as air terminals and even MRT systems and other things they never use (because they’re privileged), this is what you get.
Czech dissident, author and former president Vaclav Havel said it best when he described how, as the first president of newly-independent Czechoslovakia, he ended up living a life so different and so disconnected from that of the ordinary people: he never had to worry about gasoline or grocery prices, never had to line up, never had to cook or make his bed, never had to clean the house, never had to fret about traffic, etc. etc. And the result, he said, was an almost easy slide into a state where he no longer understood the travails of life that the ordinary citizen had to go through.
Think about it: if our leaders end up living a life of privilege (or those who come from the ranks who have lived a privileged existence since birth) how can we honestly expect them to understand our plight and put in place the programs and processes and even infrastructure that make life easier for the rest of us?
Kung hindi man saksakan ng bobo, baka palibhasa privileged. That’s maybe one reason why leaders (elected or appointed) do not speak our language, the language of the ordinary man.
