‘NAIA,’ ‘CAAP’ top Twitter trends after thousands left stranded in Manila airport fiasco

Passengers coming in or flying out of Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) were greeted with an unpleasant surprise on New Year’s Day: a widespread airspace outage led to a loss of connection at NAIA’s control tower, forcing several inbound and outbound flights to be put on hold.

Some 60,000 passengers were reportedly stranded at NAIA alone, as 282 flights were canceled.

On social media, stories about planes turning back to their country of origin after the Manila airport’s tower could not be contacted, as well as flyers waiting in terminals and on the tarmac for hours before being asked to offboard, flooded news feeds.

LOOK: Stranded passengers jampacked at NAIA Terminal 3 as flights have been put on hold over “technical issues.” (: @NashNacion) | via @michael_delizo pic.twitter.com/Rr936JL9zF

— ABS-CBN News (@ABSCBNNews) January 1, 2023

Twitter saw “NAIA” and “CAAP,” the latter referring to the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, top trends on the website.

Social media users expressed their ire over the troubles they experienced from the mess.

I’m one of the 56,000 passengers. We were detained at NAIA terminal 1 for nearly 8 hours, not permitted to cancel flights or go back to my family in Manila. Not given option to rebook from Manila. Forced us to fly to Incheon Airport with no rebooking. Stranded in Seoul airport. https://t.co/7fIYcMwule

— ProfDrDianeDesierto (@DrDesierto) January 1, 2023

Thousands of inconvenienced passengers in the NAIA fiasco and yet no word from the country’s leaders?

Do we still even have leaders or are they just vloggers?

— ❀ 𝓔𝓵𝓵𝔂 ❀ (@ItsMeLoveElly) January 2, 2023

Meanwhile, former senator Ping Lacson said that those proven to be behind diverting the budget for the air traffic control system to beautification projects “should spend their next holiday season in jail.”

Stupidity or greed? If reports are accurate that the budget appropriated by Congress for the setup of redundancies in the air traffic control system was diverted to some beautification projects at the NAIA, those responsible should spend their next holiday season in jail.

— PING LACSON (@iampinglacson) January 2, 2023

Other netizens pointed out the timely coincidence between the fiasco and the Marcos Jr’s administration’s announcement that they were planning to pursue the privatization of the airport.

let's connect the dots here. a few days ago, marcos admin announced plans to privatize NAIA. today, NAIA had to be closed due to "technical reasons" lol what an obv ploy to justify the priv of NAIA aka state abandonment of public transpo https://t.co/WJ0jSImmNp

— jax (@jaxinno) January 1, 2023

ACT Teachers Rep France Castro on NAIA glitch: The timing is quite fishy that on December 30 Department of Transportation (DOTr) Sec. Jaime Bautista said that the Marcos administration is pursuing the privatization of the country's main gateway or the NAIA… (cont’d) @gmanews

— Tina PanganibanPerez (@tinapperez) January 2, 2023

What are the odds that after the news on NAIA’s eventual privatization was announced, we kicked off 2023 with one of the biggest headscratching scenarios you could ever think of? To the tune of 300 flights and 56K affected passengers. We just can’t catch a break. pic.twitter.com/2m1uELa1RF

— Lakay (@LakasNgTimog) January 1, 2023

Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista said in a press conference that issues with the airport’s power supply and power surge led to the airport chaos. 

“The primary cause identified was a problem with the power supply and the degraded uninterrupted power supply, which had no link to the commercial power, and had to be connected to the other manually. The secondary problem was the power surge due to the power outage, which affected the equipment,” he said.

Bautista also said that the Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance/Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) system procured for NAIA was first introduced in 2010 but only implemented in 2018.