Cebu Pacific / Air Transport System
A few days ago, while picking up my car from a car detailing shop, I got into a 30 minute discussion with a guy sitting atop a beautifully maintained 17 year old Honda motorcycle. He said he was a commercial pilot, and until quite recently had worked for Cebu Pacific flying the Airbus 320. He quit, he said, because the airline doesn't provide its pilots with rest periods that conform to international standards, and he felt this contributed to pilot fatigue and thus posed a danger to the flying public. He told me as well that he's interviewing this week with Asiana Airlines, which offers salaries three times higher than those of CP. On this topic, his final point, or actually advice was to spend the extra money and fly PAL, which does meet international standards As an analogy he compared pilots to surgeons and asked me how comfortable I would be if I knew my operation was in the hands of a tired surgeon.
Our conversation drifted into a general discussion of air traffic safety in the Philippines, which helped to confirm my prior biases. I asked if it were true that there are no airports in all of Mindanao equipped with flight radars, and he responded in the affirmative. Even Cebu, he said, has only an approach radar which is misused as the airport authorities also use it to control the flight paths of planes beyond the designed radar ranges. In addition, he said, the radars in Manila and Cebu are both old, and do not incorporate current technology. When I asked him how planes flying under no radar coverage cope, he said pilots do it "the old fashioned way," by calculating speed, altitude and direction. To be fair, he also indicated that the avionics technology in newer aircraft is so sophisticated that it doesn't have to rely on instructions derived from external radars. The problem he said, is that if the onboard technology fails, absent adequate external coverage, planes could be placed in great danger. When I asked him how the government could permit the perpetuation of such an inadequate system he responded that it refuses to upgrade to the standards of other countries because of the onboard sophistication of flight systems.
Finally, he confirmed to me the truth of what I had read in a recent IATA report; that the holding patterns forced upon pilots waiting to land in Manila were dangerous. He said that such patterns require an extremely high level of concentration on the part of the pilots.
I pass a summary of our conversation on because I felt that the guy knew what he was talking about and because it deepens my concerns about flying here, particularly with Cebu Pacific.
GE.
