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We hail the announcement by Transportation and
Communications Secretary Leandro Mendoza last Thursday that the
Philippines will sign in December an open skies agreement with Asean
member-countries.
Open skies throughout the ten
countries of Asean will surely boost tourism, and of course trade,
substantially.
Among tourist industry experts
all over the world, it is an axiom that all a country has to do to
increase its tourist arrivals is to increase the number of incoming
airline seats and some mysterious alchemy goes to work. The seats
get filled and tourists come by the millions.
That is, of course, if the
country has enough nice places to visit and hotel rooms. That’s
not a problem for the Philippines. We have excellent scenic
attractions. And the tourist industry is busy building up more and
more hotels and infrastructure.
That China, Japan, India, and
South Korea are also interested in signing up with the Asean members
to form a single aviation market by 2015 is great news—not only
for tourism. A unified aviation market made up of the 10 Asean
countries plus China, Japan, India and South Korea will be the
concrete beginning of the beginnings of an East Asian-plus-India
Common Market. (It’s “plus India” because India is in South
Asia. However, its eastern states are Southeast Asian enough. Burma,
an Asean member, used to be a part of British India.)
Secretary Mendoza said the open
skies agreement is expected to bring in 500 million tourists to the
region. The Philippines is not even getting fully three million
tourists a year. If only one percent of the 500 million came to the
Philippines we would be having five million a year. At the very
conservative expenditure level of $200 per tourist who comes to the
Philippines, the income from the five million would be $10 billion
or P430 billion (at today’s rate). That’s a lot of money. Most
likely there will at least be 10 million tourists coming to the
Philippines as a result of the Asean open skies agreement. And most
likely each tourist will be spending an average of at least $400.
The unlimited flights between
capital cities will most likely start this December.
The agreement will allow airlines
of each of the ten Asean countries to fly over the territory of a
country, to stop for refueling and maintenance servicing but without
disembarking passengers or unloading cargo, and to carry passengers
and cargo from one country to another and back.
As proposed by travel agencies
and airlines, President Gloria Arroyo named the Diosdado Macapagal
International Airport (DMIA) the main site for the execution of the
open skies policy.
DMIA is now the country’s new
premier airport to accommodate the number of arrivals and landings,
Sec. Mendoza said.
The Ninoy Aquino Airport is
severely limited. It has only one runway. The capacity NAIA’s
single runway is only 13 million flights per year. With open skies
there will be much more flights arriving in the Philippines. Clark
is the only answer.
One of the largest aviation
complexes in Asia, Clark’s DMIA has two 3.2-kilometer parallel
runways. Its instrument landing system, navigational aids,
meteorological equipment, and airfield lighting system are state of
the art.
The Philippine Travel Agencies
Association (PTAA) has been batting for open skies and asking the
President to sign an Executive Order, EO 500B, specifically to make
DMIA the site of special open skies flights. That EO will no longer
be necessary. When she signs the Asean open skies agreement in
December, the Philippines will have open skies—everywhere if there
are qualified airports.
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