Beware of Bahraini Caper

Willie Baun, People's Journal columnist warned in Streetlights on February 16 about a possibe sell out in the tradition of the unequal open-skies policy with the US; only this time, it is with my beloved Bahrain:

GRIPPED by fear of a "sell-out," some leaders of the local airlines industry wonder if the February 16-17 Philippine-Bahrain air talks in Clark Field, Pampanga could be postponed.

Philippine experience in bilateral aviation talks has ended in raw deals with Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates — and the worst at the hands of the United States that bound the country to a lop-sided "open-skies" policy.

And yet, unable or worse unwilling to learn from the string of air policy debacles, the RP panel for the Clark engagement is reported about to wade in for more of the same, that is, to give the six more flights on the four already flown weekly to Manila by the tiny Arab sheikdom's flag carrier.

That would come up to 107,000 air passenger seats in RP-bound Bahraini planes or almost double the present 61,000 seats supposed to be available yearly that, roll down laughing on the aisle if you wish, have yet to be filled to capacity. With just the 30,000 overseas Filipino workers hosted by the sheikdom and a trickle of tourist dollars to offer, the Bahrainis are certainly making a spectacle of so big an appetite for so small a stomach.

Given less than 2,000 Bahraini vacationers coming to Manila yearly, the grossly expansive passenger capacity sought by the sheikdom preposterously promises negligible tourist traffic to the country. On the other hand, it gives ground to suspicion it would be diverted to the vastly larger RP-Saudi Arabia market a short hop from the sheikdom. International aviation, as in fishing, has its share of poachers, right Dennis?

The real big deal, fair and square, is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, host to roughly a million OFWs and, verifiably, the country's chief trading, economic, and "strategic" partner in the Middle East. Strangely, however, or should it be absurdly, this RP-KSA geopolitical reality is hardly reflected in their bilateral air links — which absolutely must be tightened and, if need be, stonewalled against probable massive dumping of excess air capacity by Bahrain.

It is on this predatory threat that the Philippine aviation officialdom must focus, instantly, even as the RP panel for the Clark talks faces off with the Bahrainis, an engagement that curiously has come close on the heels of the Philippines Airlines decision — reconsidered and intelligently so — to suspend its hugely losing Manila-Riyadh flights on March 2, 2006. PAL cited over-congestion in this route and the 10-year deficits incurred in servicing it as behind the planned back-out.

Moved by massive OFW clamor for their own flag carrier to board homeward and back to Saudi, PAL has obliged and, to cut losses on the overall Manila-Saudi route, urged the Department of Transportation and Communications to initiate talks for "a new Manila-Dubai-Saudi (Jeddah or Riyadh) service, with commercial traffic rights between Saudi and Dubai."

Such a routing, it was pointed out, would give PAL a fresh revenue stream (from the Dubai-Saudi sector) for its losses to be manageable even as it manages to address the needs of OFWs in Saudi and Dubai. "This is perhaps the last chance to save our flag carrier's direct air links to the OFWs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia," PAL president Jaime J. Bautista wrote in his SOS-letter to DoTC Secretary Leandro Mendoza.

It may well be PAL's "last chance," indeed, so here's hoping President Macapagal-Arroyo need not light a fire under Mendoza's seat to get him cracking.