Zest Air seems to have a lot of trouble dealing with the airport at Caticlan.

Last week, a Zest Airways Xian MA-60 (RP-C8892) with 54 passengers overshot the runway, in a repeat of a similar, more damaging overshoot earlier this year. Unlike the previous incident where 3 of the 25 passengers were injured, no one was hurt . The incident, however, raises serious questions on the safety of the plane Zest Air uses, the airport in question, and the pilots involved in the crash.

The Xian MA-60s used by Zest Airways, a Chinese manufactured copy of the Russian Antonov An-26, a military light transport. Five of these aircraft were delivered in October 2008, and Zest Air placed an additional order of 6 planes last May. With the planes practically brand new (2 and 6 months old, respectively), and with neither Cebu Pacific nor PAL Express suffering similar problems with their comparable aircraft (using the ATR-72 and Bombardier Dash 8, respectively), questions are raised about the safety record of the plane itself.

A check with AviationSafety.Net reveals only 2 incidents with the Xian MA-60, excluding the latest incident but including the incident at Caticlan last January (the page lists 9 incidents including those for the older Xian Y-7, upon which the MA-60 was based). The first incident was with an Air Zimbabwe domestic flight in January 2008, caused by pilot error.

It is then difficult to determine whether the plane’s build quality could be questioned, but having had ridden one in a flight to Busuanga earlier this year, the Xian MA-60 has a peculiarity that I hadn’t noticed when I rode the ATR-72: it brakes really hard. This becomes important when considering that Godofredo P. Ramos Airport at Caticlan has a runway length of only 810 meters.

The length of the runway makes for very harrowing landings, as illustrated by various photos of approaches at the Caticlan airport. On one end of the runway, about 30 meters from its edge is a road (as seen in the crash photo above) frequented by tricycles and jeepneys. On the other end of the runway is a hill. There have been efforts to try and lengthen this runway, unfortunately, thwarted by “political wrangling at the local level”:

Local air carriers have long requested the [Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines] that the runway be lengthened either by extending Runway 06 to the sea or removing a hill at the end of Runway 24.

However the CAAP was not able to carry out the runway improvements because of political wrangling at the local level. [BusinessMirror]

A third angle is, of course, pilot error. In the January incident, the pilot of RP-C8893 undershot the runway and hit the perimeter fence of the runway (clearly visible in the photos shown). In this latest incident, the pilot overshot the runway, after requesting to land despite having a tail wind:

Initial investigation showed that when he asked for landing instructions, the pilot, Capt. Bernard Hervoso, was directed to Runway 06, the “active” runway at the time. However, it was reported that Hervoso requested to use Runway 24 instead.

The request was granted, although it would mean that the airplane would be landing with a tailwind.

Investigators are now verifying eyewitnesses reports that the plane landed almost at the middle of [the] runway. [BusinessMirror]

Only after a full investigation will we be able to get all the facts straight, and determine whether the crash was caused by human error or by safety deficiencies in the aircraft. Considering that there are more than 30 flights in and out of the Godofredo Ramos Airport everyday — being the gateway of Boracay (it is, in fact, the third busiest airport in Western Visayas) — the best long term solution would be to lengthen the runway once and for all. Only then will margins of error for the pilots be large enough to cancel out problems with braking, late touchdowns, or clearing perimeter fences.

We only hope that the government of the Municipality of Malay would care.

Photo of engine nacelle and propeller copyright the author, all rights reserved. Photo of Zest Airways RP-C8892 and Cebu Pacific RP-C7250 before touchdown at Godofredo P. Ramos Airport by Ryan Hemmings via Airliners.Net. Photo of RP-C8892 crashed in ditch by user MapLand of 101today.com/travel.

Through the efforts of blogger Kevin Ray Chua, the issue caught the attention of Senator Mar Roxas, who sent a letter to Cebu Pacific asking them to explain the above incidents.

Finally, Cebu Pacific’s Guest Services Head Ivan Gaw was kind enough to respond regarding the said issue:

This incident had been an eye opener also for our company. With this incident, we revised our procedures for carriage of Deaf passengers and still not compromising safety. Since July 2008, Cebu Pacific accepts unlimited number of unescorted Deaf/ Mute guests in all of our aircrafts provided that they shall be properly briefed by our Cabin Attendants about safety, the use of seatbelt, oxygen mask, life vest, route to the nearest exit, etc. The only condition is that they must not be seated at any emergency exit rows.

…

I’m also happy to inform you that we are coordinating with the group of Sir Nonoy Concha and party for an awareness seminar about proper handling of passengers with disabilities. We are targeting mid-February. We also would want to include our learning’s from this awareness seminar to the front line training program. I am constantly in loop with them.

Rest assured that it’s not the intention of Cebu Pacific to discriminate anybody. We value all of our guest irregardless of gender, status, and condition. [Filipino Deaf from the Eyes of a Hearing Person]

Kudos to Cebu Pacific for their policy changes! I hope that this will set an example not only in the airline or transport industry, but to all industries and service providers, in understanding and handling the needs not only of the deaf but other persons with disabilities.

Disclosure: The author’s spouse owns and operates a travel agency, which may be construed (but the author hopes it is not) as to having an effect on the context of this post.

There’s a fantastic story that came in yesterday afternoon about a Puerto Princesa fisherman being saved by a pod of spinner dolphins and pilot whales. As the story goes, the fisherman had been floating in the open water for nearly 24 hours, bleeding from crustacean bites, when a pod of dolphins took it upon themselves to nudge the man and his makeshift lifeboat towards the shore.

“Dumating yung mga dolphins. Ang dami nila. Tapos may lumapit na dalawang balyena. Dun sila sa tigkabilang tabi ko lumalangoy,” he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer. (There were dolphins, lots of them. Then a pair of whales started swimming on both sides)

“Palit palitan sila tinutulak ako gamit ang kanilang palikpik,” (They would push me alternately using their fins). Meanwhile, he said the rest of the pod stayed close to him to around just a meter away apparently trying to make sure no harm would come to him from any other animal. [Inquirer.Net]

What makes fisherman Ronnie Dabal’s ordeal more special is that he and Puerto Princesa Mayor Edward Hagedorn attributed the fisherman’s “rescue” as a sign of gratitude from the dolphins. As it turns out, Dabal is a deputized dolphin warden, and part-times as a dolphin spotter and habitat protector in Puerto Princesa Bay.

Dolphin spotters — a common second job for Puerto Princesa fishermen — head out early in the morning to look for large pods of dolphins, whose location they then relay to boatmen bringing tourists in for dolphin watching tours (using, what else: SMS text messages). Ronnie Dabal had been part of a program conducted by the Palawan NGO Network and ABS-CBN Bantay Kalikasan Foundation, with the help of the City of Puerto Princesa administration, wherein local folk, especially fisherfolk, are trained to find, identify, and protect dolphins, whale sharks, and other marine life as well as their habitats. Ultimately, locals earn revenues from eco-tourism activities, making for a win-win situation wherein the environment is protected and the locals earn a windfall from tourism, augmenting their traditional fishing or farming livelihood.

The locals, in turn, have a lot to thank for with such programs. A little over a year ago, my wife, her friends and I visited Puerto Princesa, where we were brought on an island hopping tour of Honda Bay by a guide named (I kid you not) Gloria. Gloria gave us a complete and detailed rundown of the tour: the origins of the word “Honda” (from the Spanish “hondo”, meaning “deep”, and not the Japanese car maker), the vigorous clean and green efforts of the city (our chain-smoking friend was getting mouthfuls from Gloria, boatmen, and other locals alike each and every time he would out of sheer habit throw aside a cigarette butt), and the various resort islands in the bay. It didn’t stop there; by the time we were in the water, not only was she pulling five snorkelers (my wife and her barkada) all at the same time, she would identify each kind of fish, crustacean, and coral that was there, sometimes by species name. Later that afternoon, I casually asked her if she were from a fishing family, with her excellent swimming skills and strong sea legs. I was surprised when she answered back: “hindi, magsasaka ako”.

It is difficult to believe that merely a decade and a half before, some locals and fishermen not unlike Ronnie Dabal were considered as part of the problem when it comes to environmental protection. In 1997, whale sharks, colloquially known as butanding, were discovered in Donsol, Sorsogon, and where subsequently hunted for their soft white flesh, which can be sold to Taiwanese dealers at around $15 a kilo — the most expensive whale meat in the world. As late as 1999, an estimate put 70,000 fishermen, or about 12% of the fishermen in the Philippines, are involved in illegal dynamite fishing.

Over the past decade, the tide is being turned with the help of various NGOs, as well as their respective LGUs, training programs were set up all around the country, and eco-tourism has become an increasingly bigger part in the lives and livelihoods of locals. Fishermen, aside from being dolphin spotters, are also being trained to be snorkeling guides and lifeguards — quite easy for them since it is customary for them to skin dive during fishing trips. Womenfolk are being taught crafts to be able to sell as souvenirs; everyone is being taught basic English to be able to communicate with foreign tourists. Donsol fishermen, for their part, have become whale spotters themselves, earning large sums during the whale shark watching season.

While I have no solid numbers at this point, my own trips around the country over the past year looks promising — the stories of Filipinos who are increasingly turning to eco-tourism to augment their incomes — or sometimes, who turned such activities into full-time jobs, are the same whether one goes to Palawan, or Bohol, or Davao, or Camiguin. Our guide in Bohol was a former OFW; our divemaster in Davao comes from a family of farmers; our Camiguin guide was a former Stork sales agent. Over that same year I learned to appreciate marine life to a greater extent, far from being an ordinary beach bum frolicking at the edge of the water and enjoying white sand.

The first time I snorkeled, and saw first hand just how beautiful Philippine marine ecosystems are, was in December 2007 — by November 2008 I tried, for the first time, scuba diving, finally being able to touch those corals:

No need for any fancy doctorate degree from an overseas university to appreciate that beauty, definitely. No need for audio even. It’s amazing just how teeming the marine ecosystem is at merely five to ten feet from the surface. My wife took this footage with a regular digital camera in a waterproof case, but needed to just snorkel above me and the dive master to capture the richness of the reef below.

Oh, and if you’d rant that it’s probably gonna be expensive — that 20 minute dive only costs PHP1,000 per person. It would’ve been PHP1,200 for two dives, but we couldn’t take a second dive since our flight was later that day, and apparently it is quite deadly to go on a flight right after going on scuba. One thousand pesos — the amount you’d spend on just one bag of groceries in SM — for the experience of a lifetime.

Clearly, the Philippine eco-tourism scene’s promising outlook presents several lessons that must be fully appreciated. Foremost of these lessons is that locals will fiercely defend whatever livelihood they have — make the environment their livelihood and they will defend it out of their own volition. Everything else follows — compliance with laws, self-policing amongst ranks, even a total change in attitude with regards to littering.

On the other hand, we have to do our part in helping our eco-tourism industry grow as big as it can, and the best way to do this is to go out there and see it for yourself. If there’s any way that best implements an effective “trickle down” effect (whether or not you believe in it), it is going to the provinces and spending money on the services and goods offered by locals. Instead of bringing your money out to shopping in Hong Kong or going to Disneyland or Ocean Park, check out the real fish in the real ocean. Experience the beauty of the countryside — and vigorously promote it to city dwellers both here and abroad.

Everyone will benefit from that.

That wasn’t the end of story though: when we got back to Manila, the box of mangosteen we had was in shambles. Apparently it rained hard while the luggage was being loaded onto the plane, and parts of the carton box disintegrated. Several pieces of the 150-pesos-a-kilo mangosteen fruit fell out of the box, hopefully to be retrieved by airline cleanup crew so the darn things don’t go to waste.

This morning, something worse happened to one of my wife’s clients, part of a party of 27 people going to Bohol today. His cellphone went missing, from inside his luggage which was checked in for the 4:50 AM Cebu Pacific flight from Manila to Cebu. Fortunately his wallet and digicam, which were also in the bag, were not taken, but it’s absolutely alarming that you could lose valuables while your baggage is being handled by airport personnel. We’ll file a report with Cebu Pacific and NAIA 3, and perhaps with the Mactan International Airport when they come back from their Bohol trip on Wednesday.

What many people don’t realize is that the handling of checked in luggage is absolutely horrid and utterly unsafe to check luggage in, in any airport or with any airline in the world. Baggage handling is rough, with machines constantly and violently shoving, pushing, and tumbling your luggage around as it makes its way from the check-in counter to the plane, when baggage handlers will likewise pass them around like basketballs in a hurried bid to get the plane flying on time.

While you can opt to lock your luggage, it’s no guarantee that contents will not be lost, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that your luggage will arrive intact. Here are some guidelines to prevent luggage from getting lost and mishandled on your flights:

• Get some good pieces of luggage – Hard-cased and heavy duty luggages are expensive and all, but they’re quite sturdy and dependable hence their popularity. For hard-cased luggage, there’s also the guarantee that the bag won’t be squeezed in when tons upon tons of other luggage are put on top of it. Try buying luggage that can be contracted/expanded, depending on load, however, or ones with straps to hold down your things, as they are quite necessary as I’d point out in the next item.
• Use an appropriate-sized bag for your luggage – Use a bag that is just right for the job. A bag that’s too loosely packed will tend to be crushed and/or its contents will toss and tumble inside; a bag that’s too tightly packed might be torn apart at the zippers when additional weight is applied. Make sure you pack your bag just right. You could opt to look for luggage with straps that could hold down your stuff, however, so your things won’t fly around the luggage when they’re too loose.
• Do NOT check in your valuables and electronics – While several types of electronics (especially cellphones) are prohibited for in-flight use, it’s not worth risking having them thrown around in bags or luggage. This is especially true for laptops, where dropping and mishandling usually spells the bitter end for hard drives. Hand-carry your electronics, especially your laptops and cellular phones, as much as possible.
• Lock your luggage with padlocks – Buy a good, small padlock to keep your luggage from being opened up. One can never be sure that there is no airport personnel who won’t be tempted to swipe a nice cellphone or iPod if your bag’s zipper fails and unravels its contents. Unfortunately if you are traveling to and within the United States this might be a bad idea, since the Department of Homeland Security sees it fit to destroy each and every padlock in sight in a pathetic attempt to “prevent terrorism”. Of course, to make this step unnecessary, refer to the previous rule.
• Put identification on your luggage – Use hard-to-remove bag tags or labels to properly identify the owner of the luggage. I never realized how important this is until the incident in Davao: the backpack had no bag tag, and the airport employees had to rummage through my wife’s things to figure out who she was. Make their lives easier by indicating your name clearly on your bags.

Of course the best and safest way for circumventing the need for these is to pack light and have everything on your hand carry luggage. I still have to replicate Art’s amazing luggage crunching feat, which is especially difficult for a man with my large and bulky frame, but if there’s a will, there must be a way!

Three years ago I was employed with a company that regularly sends employees to the US. I got fired from that post and never got to go. With my next employer there were two occasions wherein I would’ve been able to go abroad, first to Hong Kong, then to the US. Neither trips pushed through. With my current employer I got the opportunity to fly to South Africa — that didn’t push through either. Finally, last month I applied for a position that would assign me in either Shanghai, or Copenhagen. I didn’t get the post, and as with the others none of the trips came into fruition.

I don’t really bewail the fact that I wasn’t able to travel abroad. I have done it before, for leisure (my sister and I went to the US a decade ago to visit our late grandparents), and I have some sort of vow that if I’m ever to travel abroad, it would be for leisure. In fact, I do have a written promise to myself that I’ll fight my battles in this country, in an earlier manifestation of this blog hosted by Friendster.

Many times we take for granted things that we say to ourselves, whether or not they are half-meant, but it occurred to me that a big chunk of the realities that we experience were things that we always talk about.

For example, back when I was newly married and had a low paying job in a local bank, I had often wondered when and how I would reach a pay grade like that of my managers’ back then. Now, only four years later, my salary is around four and a half times (before taxes! :p) my pay the day I asked that question. Back when I was a teenager I vowed that, before exploring the world, I would explore the Philippines first. Today, aside from the fact that I was able to visit several tourist destinations in the country within 14 months, my wife actually owns the travel agency that made the trips possible in the first place!

Indeed, that promise — that vow, to stay in the country and work our way to progress despite the difficulty in doing so, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those little promises allowed me, along with my wife (I’m very, very lucky to have a wife who shares my dreams and ideals), to recognize potential, read sign posts in our lives, and take advantage of what to others appear to be an environment bereft of opportunity.

Over the years I have learned not to mind the fact that I haven’t been able to go abroad to work or corner a job opportunity out of the country. It doesn’t matter. I’ve told myself once before that my fight is right here in this country, and the way things are going, I’m really, really enjoying it.

Asian Spirit has since been renamed Zest Airways, or simply, ZestAir, complete with a new orange and green livery:

Photo by Xu Zheng, taken from airliners.net. Click on the pic to enlarge.

“Asia’s most refreshing airline” has been continuing the major refleeting effort started before Yao’s acquisition of the airline, with new Xian MA-60 turboprops replacing most of its old aircraft. ZestAir is retaining its De Havilland Dash-7 aircraft however.

An interesting note is that the ZestAir website fleet homepage now officially publicizes their intent to acquire at least one (apparently, up to four) 220-seater Airbus A320. Once this jet is delivered, ZestAir will be at par with big players Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific, and would leave behind Southeast Asian Airlines as the only major Filipino carrier without a wide-bodied aircraft.

Furthermore, the arrival of yet another Airbus-powered airline might spur a new round of price-wars amongst the local carriers. If that happens, it will be good for all Philippine travellers — hopefully it won’t be at the expense of good service, though!

I personally believe that that contest will fail, considering some of their “victims” consist of the country’s more active members of the blogosphere, all of whom subscribe to each others’ blogs and would have read about their alleged atrocities already. A blogging contest would be tantamount to hiring amateurs, when what they need is a competent PR agency in the Philippines to repair their image.

Now if they can’t (or won’t) afford a professional PR agency, I’m sure these things would help though:

• Train their people in customer relations, especially in handling irate customers. Seriously. The way some of their employees treat passengers who are already inconvenienced despite being paid customers needs really, really serious work. If their employees start treating their customers with more respect then maybe the inconvenience of having one’s flight delayed would be lessened.
• Learn to sincerely apologize to their customers when such inconveniences happen. Not only have passengers experienced being shouted at or mocked, many have had nary a sorry from employees, nor the company, when things go wrong. No wonder these people would blog bad things about them. Even a blanket apology after the fact may be able to restore whatever goodwill was lost during unfortunate situations.
• Stop trying to fight fire with fire. Arguing with irate customers makes things worse. Ignoring customers who need attention makes things worse. Putting up a blogging contest which will usually comprise of empty testimonials which were written for the sake of prizes will not effectively counter around two years worth of negative blog entries, all written with sincere disappointment. Nobody could ever trump that kind of blogging, especially if an already massive amount of entries is already on the net. There are ways to find out how to contact these bloggers: communicate with them instead — and maybe that act by itself would convince those bloggers that 5J actually cares about them, and write about that instead.

Now I do not have any experience in public relations — the only training I have ever received was a Guthrie Jensen conducted customer service seminar four years ago. But if Cebu Pacific did even just one of the points stated above, I’d be convinced that there’s hope for things to be better with them.

The contest is open to all bloggers, although the prizes are yet to be specified; do read the official blog entry to read the mechanics. The main item in the mechanics that amuses me, however, is item number 4:

Contest entries are blog posts that:

1. are at least 200 words long;
2. talk about places that are destinations of Cebu Pacific flights (e.g., Davao City);
3. must not contain negative reviews of the airline or any harmful content pertaining to the airline in any manner;
4. contain at least one text link to http://www.cebupacificair.com (e.g., “Cebu Pacific” or “affordable flights in the Philippines”), and must not have the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the link tag;
5. must not contain any other links except to Cebu Pacific’s website.

Emphasis mine.

Cebu Pacific has undergone a LOT of negative criticism lately, including from this blogger, and all I see in this contest is a futile effort to “balance” the “distorted” views of Cebu Pacific online and convince everyone that their airline is great, if only because they’re baiting us bloggers to blog about them in a positive way.

The irony is that the solution to Cebu Pacific’s bad reputation woes will need a lot more than a blogging contest. I will have to reserve my opinions regarding how to reverse public perception for another post.

Consider this as my (un)official entry to the blogging contest.

I’ve found out through one of the comments in this blog that someone has gone to the lengths of putting up a blog/website that compiles (or rather, links to) the worst-of-the-worst horror stories on the web about Cebu Pacific’s terrible customer service. It’s rather long-windedly entitled To the victims of Cebu Pacific… We don’t deserve to be treated this way but its URL is lovely: http://wehatecebupacific.webs.com/.

I wonder if someone would buy a legit domain for that.

Four weeks ago, on our trip to Camiguin via Cagayan de Oro, we were able to experience firsthand the difference between the service that 5J and PR (Philippine Airlines) offers. I never realized the big, big difference of being offered water and coffee for free (of course there’s also a big difference between the airfare that trumps the cost of water and coffee, but that’s another story). Add to that unsettling feeling of being hurried along that I always get with Cebu Pac(they space their flights much, much closer to each other using as few planes as possible — go figure!). The fact that I took the PAL flight only two weeks apart from another Cebu Pacific flight only made the differences more obvious.

So, if you have your own Cebu Pacific horror stories to share, or just want to read them for some morbid entertainment, read http://wehatecebupacific.webs.com/.

CEB was also ranked by the magazine as No. 23 in the world and No. 5 in Asia in total passengers carried in 2007.

CEB carried a total of almost 5.5 million passengers in 2007, up 57.4 per cent from 2006. [Yahoo! Finance]

This is one of the reasons why Cebu Pacific has been gung-ho in expanding their operations, including a change in their online reservation system which led to quite a fuss in this blog a few months ago.

Kudos to them, although I hope we get less complaints about their services instead of more. Growth at the expense of customer service is the worst marketing tactic anybody can ever use.

Hat tip to Technogra.ph for this story.