It’s become normalized since the 2022 election results that at least on the shamelessly middle/upper class echo chamber of Twitter and Facebook, little is done to flesh out issues. After all, it is easier to just pin the blame on Duterte-Marcos. After all, we are angry and exhausted, and would want nothing more than to draw that line between ourselves and the 31 million that voted Marcos-Duterte into power.

While the impulse is understandable, anyone would be hard put to prove that this is the right way to deal with issues at this point. Not when issues are important and critical, and especially when we are so easily distracted by noise, both deliberately manufactured and inadvertently skewed away from asking the right, more difficult, questions.

The mess at our airports on January 1 is one such instance. Because the noise has been primarily about pinning the blame on Duterte—he who inaugurated the Communication, Navigation, Surveillance and Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) project—and on Marcos, who has generally fallen quiet as he is wont to do, what we’ve evaded are actual questions about Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) projects, the delays that this particular CNS/ATM project faced, and the three (count that!) presidents under whom this particular project fell—Marcos excluded.

In 2010, opinion pieces on the ATM/CNS deal was already raised as a red flag given allegations of a Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) awarding “Package 1 of the Communications, Navigation and Surveillance/Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) Systems Development Project contract to lone bidder Sumitomo-Thales and is about to award Package 2 to the same bidder.” Here, we would be talking about Gloria Arroyo years:

As early as 2009, the COA has already concluded that the previous DOTC management committed “glaring management errors” when it failed to bar the Sumitomo-Thales joint venture from bidding for the CNS/ATM contract, noting that Thales (Thomson CSF) was the same contractor that abandoned the DOTC’s P1-billion Global Maritime Distress Safety Project in 2000.

In May 2010, as per JICA’s own newsletter, Japanese experts were in the Philippines precisely to do skills development training with Pinoys. Even then the loan was pegged at JPY22.049 billion or P10.5 billion pesos for “the establishment of new satellite-based communication, navigation, surveillance and air traffic management (CNSATM) system in line with the Global Air Navigation Plan of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).” In that same article it was aid that “The new CNS/ATM system will be in place by 2013.” 

In January 2011, calls continued against the DOTC’s approval of the Sumitomo-Thales deal. CAAP employees themselves called on Aquino to reconsider the approval:

“We are calling on Pres. Benigno Simeon Aquino III and Transportation Secretary Jose de Jesus, to seriously consider their decision to proceed with the communication, navigation surveillance and air traffic management, CNS/ATM project for our international airport. Unless nipped in the bud, this P13.5 billion “behemoth” has the makings of another NBN-ZTE scandal.”

In 2011, COA turned down the contract between the DOTC and Sumitomo-Thales; in March 2013, an amended contract was approved.

In June 2013, Aquino’s DOTC signed a deal with “Sumitomo-Thales Joint Venture to deliver CNS/ATM (communications, navigation, and surveillance/air traffic management) systems.” The promise was a swift turnover: “The new CNS/ATM Systems to be installed over the next two-and-a-half years to modernise country’s aviation safety and security capabilities.”

In 2014, another P159.9 million acquisition from Thales Australia Limited would be made by CAAP. It sought to “upgrade the Eurocat air traffic management system, a computerized air traffic control and management solution that controls enroute, overflights, arriving and departing air traffic from as far as 250 kilometers away.” The promise was that it would be done by the fourth quarter of 2014, and the press release came with an admission of “delays” in the CNS/ATM project.

CAAP said the improvement is essential because the P13 billion next-generation satellite-based Communications, Navigation, Surveillance/Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) project that was signed during the previous administration was delayed and would not be in place until the end of 2015.

The aviation regulator said the absence of a ready substitute is a cause for worry for CAAP because if the Eurocat bogs down, the operational load of air traffic will be affected and flight disruptions will have an effect on Philippine airspace.

This makes the CNS/ATM project(s) an Aquino administration one, not a Duterte administration one. That Duterte had the “good” fortune of inaugurate it in 2018 is beside the point.

Part of that inauguration was the admission of delays on the project: “The CNS/ATM project started in 2009 but due to the delay in construction and other challenges, it did not hit its target completion date in 2016. Previously, there were only three radars—in Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA), Clark, and Tagaytay—which covered only 30% of Philippine airspace. Under the current DOTr leadership, 10 additional radars have been installed. This means that the country now has a total of 13 radars, and one satellite radar, which will enable the air sector to cover 100% of the entire Philippine airspace.”

At this point though, the question is: anong silbi ng 100% covered airspace, when it is would be outdated after a year?

Today, CAAP Director General Capt. Manuel Tamayo said: “Kasi like anything, it is an electrical system, meron na nga tayong backup, dalawa na nga ‘yan, but still it failed.  Now, our CNS/ATM, this was conceptualized way back in the late 90’s, naumpisahan ‘to I think 2010, and finally it was completed in 2018.  So medyo — as far as the technology is concerned — it is already outdated.”

The question we should be asking is this: why is a project that was started in 2009, only inaugurated in 2018, and then rendered outdated by 2019. And why didn’t the current Marcos leadership, told about the need for an upgrade, not prioritize this, which in turn opened up our national security and mobility to such risk and danger? Tamayo himself had made the recommendation “to no less than the President.”

More questions: what happens in the course of these ODA projects? Who earns from these, and what kind of bureaucracy keeps it from being finished in a timely manner? What kind of transparency and accountability can be had from government offices, especially when we’re talking about three different presidents, and three different leaderships at the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC), now Department of Transportation (DOTr)?

We like to blame Marcos and Duterte, but this one goes back to GMA and PNoy. And this is true for many problems that we’ve faced all this time, and many others we will face. Our crises cut across various governments, and will mean looking with more clarity at the leaderships that we thought were faultless or special. And until we admit that, until we acknowledge how deep-seated and long-drawn out our crises are, then we might always miss out on actually understanding them, towards pushing for more productive solutions, beyond loyalties, beyond political color. ***