Subic Chamber Responds To Airport Issue

Comment from Danny Piano who is the current President of the Subic Bay Chamber of Commerce in response to The Subic Bulletin story Field Landing Practice At Subic Airport:

The email from one of your readers regarding the US Navy’s Field Carrier Landing Practice can obviously be part of the various options to reviving the SBIA. The Chamber will definitely look into it. We are aware that this could not be as easy as it looks, however.

First, regular carrier-based FCLP’s will still require logistics support from a land base. A permanent base is obviously not possible because of the September 13, 1991 rejection by the Philippine Senate to extend the RP-US Military Bases Treaty. An alternative would be to do this under the Visiting Forces Agreement’s joint RP-US Balikatan Exercises. There is no doubting the legitimacy of the Balikatan Exercises after the RP Supreme Court ruled in its favor in April 11, 2002. The question, obviously, is how could there be possibly a joint Balikatan Exercise about FCLP’s? Finally, granting that it is possible, the airport itself will most likely not benefit financially since Article VIII (Movements of Vessels and Aircraft) par. 3 of the VFA states that “Vehicles, vessels, and aircraft operated by or for the United States armed forces shall not be subject to the payment of landing or port fees, navigation or overflight charges, or tolls or other use charges, including light and harbor dues, while in the Philippines”. It will have indirect financial benefits to others, though.

It will require a lot of research and legwork to check the possibility of this option. The Chamber itself lacks the manpower and resources to deal with all the issues in and around the Subic Freeport. It only has three salaried employees. The rest of the people involved, including the Board of Directors, works on a purely volunteer basis. We will still do our best to find more information about it, however.

With regards to the Chamber’s Airport Committee, there have been a lot of progress made already. The committee is composed of SBF locators, SBMA, and various stakeholders from within and outside the Freeport.

Information about the committee can be found on the chambers website http://subicchamber.org

Briefly, some of the alternatives being acted upon by the committee are:
1. Tour flights from South Korea. This is being spearheaded by Hanafil Golf in collaboration with Hana Tours, the biggest tour company in Korea.
2. Tour and OFW flights from/to Taiwan. Sammy Chou and Paul Gan of the Taiwan Chamber is spearheading this one. Talks with a Taiwan Ambassador is forthcoming.
3. OFW flights from/to Dubai. SBMA’s tourism and investment group are at the forefront of this one. The Greater Subic Bay Tourism Bureau and the Tour Operators group are also designing custom tour packages that will cater to various groups, from high-end tourists to OFW tours. Charles Davis, owner of Seahorse Tours and former director of America-On-Line is at the forefront of the design of these tour packages.
4. Future flights to/from Guam. This is being collaborated with Olongapo City’s Workforce to Guam group. Initial talks were already made with an airline company with existing flights from Guam to Japan to Australia and back. Obviously, a short Subic stopover in the Japan-Australia route is very feasible.
5. A few days ago, talks were also conducted with Ambassador Jimenez, owner of Pacific Pearl, about marketing local tourist destinations. Just recently also, the possibility of day tours to Hongkong was considered.
6. Yvette Ocampo of Jungle Joe’s World is conducting talks with various government agencies pushing for efforts to revive the Subic Airport.
7. The SBMA Airport Department, on the other hand, is busy contacting airline cargo companies who might be interested to use SBIA as their hub. The department, headed by Gen. Mar Santos also conducted a workshop to tie everybody’s efforts.

In line with promoting Subic, the SBMA/SBFCC Marketing and Promotion Working Group, also last week discussed other possibilities. This is a group composed of Business Group SDA Stef Sano, various SBMA heads, and SBFCC directors.

Needless to say, efforts from the Chamber, SBMA, SBF locators, and even businesses outside the Freeport are being done to revive the Subic Airport. There was a bit of a failure to widely inform the public of the efforts being made but we will try to correct this in the days to come.

Reviving SBIA is not an easy task so we invite you and your readers to join the Chamber’s Airport committee (or other committees) as volunteers. It does not even matter if you are not a member of SBFCC – the majority of the Airport Committee members aren’t. We need all the help we can get.

We thank you and your letter sender for providing inputs in trying to help the Subic Freeport – we are, after all, whether we like it or not, part of it.

Prof. Danny Piano
President, SBFCC