Corruption At Clark Airport

Comment from a reader on "Another Reason To Avoid Clark Airport":

I aggree with SB's answer. I had to pay it at Clark but never in Manila. And I do have concrete proof of corruption and I could point to the two immigration officers involved.

On 3 occassions i gave the money for my departure immigration fees to the officers rather than the cashier. (2170 pesos) on all occassions they told me if I wanted a receipt I would miss my flight. I would rather do without the receipt but I would also prefer not to encourage this kind of corruption.

There are other reasons that you may not be aware of. The approach control radar at clark is broken, and has beeen for at least 3 to 4 months now. THis was a brand new piece of kit less than 2 years ago and needs spares. This not only reduces safety, it adds about 20minutes to each flight costing the airlines and ultimately you money.

Its not the only airport with this problem. Mactan Cebu's radar was also down when I was there last month. The countries aviation safety category was downgraded to category 2 a couple of years back. (this roughly equates to "basket case category"). If anything it has got worse since then. Security is a disaster as well.

As for the airprt tax, most countries have done away with it but I believe Indonesia still has it. But hat is another story altogether.