PH airspace to close for 6 hours on May 17: MIAA

Philippine airspace will be shut down on May 17 to give way for maintenance activities on the country’s air traffic management system to avoid a repeat of the infamous New Year’s Day shutdown.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA) General Manager Cesar Chiong announced that the entire Philippine airspace will be shut down for a “major activity.”

Sought to elaborate, MIAA Senior Assistant General Manager

Bryan Co said that “for May 17, it’s the entire Philippine airspace that will be shut down because of the scheduled maintenance or replacement of the UPS of the CNS/ATM or ‘yung air traffic management center natin.”

UPS stands for the Uninterruptible Power Supply while CNS/ATM refers to the Communications, Navigations, Surveillance/Air Traffic. Management)

Co said that the airspace shutdown will be from 12 midnight until 6 a.m. on May 17, 2023.

He said the maintenance activity could be shorter, “but as far as planning is concerned we’re planning for six hours.”

Chiong said the MIAA management will meet with all of the 43 airlines operating at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) to discuss the plan.

The MIAA chief said the agency will be requesting from the airlines how many flights will be rescheduled due to the airspace shutdown and how they plan to implement their recovery flights.

The Ring of Fire” – that is what scientists call that thin region of dynamic volcanic and seismic activity around the rim of the Pacific Ocean.

“The activity is the result of the movement of the tectonic plates, the surface crust on which our world is formed, which slowly grow and butt against one another causing cracks that allow deeper molten rock to rise to the surface through what we call volcanoes. Any movement of the plates creates seismic activity we know as earthquakes,” wrote Lindsay Bennet in her travel book entitled Philippines.

Unfortunately, the Philippines – a country with more than 7,100 islands – is located in this rim, sometimes called the circum-Pacific seismic belt. Disasters are not just waiting to happen; they happen every now and then.

As Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, puts it: “The Philippines is one of the most disaster-prone places on Earth. They’ve got it all. They’ve got earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tropical cyclones, landslides.”

Perhaps, not too many Filipinos are aware that our country has around 200 volcanoes scattered all over the archipelago. Fortunately, only 24 are considered active and another 27 are