Nitpicking

In the wake of a tragic incident, it's natural for the public to demand answers and to demand them fast.

- MARY ANN LL. REYES

That urgency often leads to real change. But in our rush to assign blame, we sometimes overlook the complexity of the systems we're trying to fix.

The recent accident at NAIA Terminal 1 has brought renewed scrutiny to long-standing infrastructure issues: specifically, the shallow steel bollards installed in 2019, and the diagonal layout of the drop-off lanes introduced in the 1990s. These are not new problems. They are legacy decisions, carried over from past administrations and past contractors. And until recently, they remained largely unquestioned.

Much of the public's attention has rightly been directed at those who designed, built, or approved those features. But as is often the case, there are also those who are quick to point fingers at whoever is holding the reins today without taking time to understand what they inherited or how far they've already come.

New NAIA Infra Corp. (NNIC) officially took over airport operations in September 2024, inheriting management over every square meter of infrastructure, including runways, terminals, access roads, baggage systems and yes, safety installations like those steel bollards. All these contracts were awarded by the government which used to operate and maintain NAIA. Presumably, the work followed the safety and engineering standards of the time.

There was, and reasonably so, a presumption of regularity. The bollards appeared intact. There were no immediate signs of structural failure. Short of digging them up, it would have been difficult to know they had been poorly anchored. And when you step into a facility as complex and overburdened as NAIA, where so much demands attention, you focus first on what's visibly broken and immediately impactful.

That's exactly what NNIC did. In just seven months, it decongested terminals, improved aircraft turnaround times, streamlined ground operations and initiated a comprehensive audit of both airside and landside infrastructure.