New airport faces partial shutdown

Mistakes, graft found in almost all contracts
AMORNRAT MAHITTHIROOK
Bangkok Post, 25 December 2006

Poor construction at Suvarnabhumi may force parts of the new airport to be shut down for repairs. This would open the way for the recently abandoned Don Muang airport to be re-opened to serve Bangkok's air traffic needs.

Deputy Transport Minister Sansern Wongcha-um said yesterday that following a recent report on the problems facing Suvarnabhumi airport, it was likely that part of the new facility would have to be closed and Don Muang airport would pick up the slack.

Some people had suggested the airport, open less than three months, be completely closed for a revamp, with flights being redirected to Don Muang until the improvements are completed, Mr Sansern said. He was opposed to that. Trying to move everything back to Don Muang would cause chaos.

The Council for Democratic Reform _ now the Council for National Security _ asked about the readiness of Suvarnabhumi airport just after the Sept 19 coup, but executives of the Airports of Thailand (AoT) had insisted the airport was ready for the scheduled Sept 28 opening.

Opening the airport before it was completed had inevitably led to problems. If the opening had been delayed to allow work to be finished properly, the airport would have started on a more solid footing.

The new AoT board appointed after the coup has discovered physical and managerial problems at Suvarnabhumi airport.

Board member Yodyiam Theptranont, who heads a sub-panel investigating the problems, said the repairs would take a long time. He could not give a timeframe.

Mr Yodyiam's report to the AoT board outlined a lengthy list of complaints and deficiencies, along with a list of recommendations on fixing the problems.

The report attributed the faults to substandard construction, poor management and manipulation of designs and materials.

The report said the airport's information technology facilities were incomplete and the upper floors of the car park building have no drains, causing rain water to flow into elevator shafts.

Over 1,000 lamps had already burned out and not been replaced.

Mr Yodyiam said AoT lacked an official with direct responsibility for the airport's construction, which had posed an obstacle in getting swift repairs.

Another AoT board member, Tortrakul Yomnak, said many areas need repairs and a partial closure was likely.

Chaisak Angsuwan, director-general of the Civil Aviation Department, said that due to the persistent problems, the department could not issue a permanent licence for Suvarnabhumi airport.

It would, however, extend an interim aerodrome certificate for the airport for another six months in January, he said.

Mr Chaisak said the airport needed to meet all physical and operational requirements before it could be given a permanent certificate.


There were many cracks in the airport's taxiways, some serious and some not, and repairs would be time-consuming, he said. Many operations staff also have no expertise in using their equipment.

Adm Bannawit Kengrian, chairman of the National Legislative Assembly's committee on Suvarnabhumi airport, said his panel had discovered mistakes and irregularities in almost all the airport's contracts. Names of those believed responsible would be announced in two weeks.

Specifications in some contracts had been distorted, he said.

Salaries paid executives of the Novotel Suvarnabhumi Airport Hotel were unusually high. Despite its claimed five-star status, the hotel had plywood doors.

An inexperienced contractor operated transformers that supply power to visiting aircraft and six transformers had burnt out. The cost of digging ditches around the airport was inflated to three billion baht and hiring security guards to five billion baht.

Any contracts where corruption was found would be scrapped, he said.

An appalling case of neglect

Bangkok Post editorial, 16 December 2006

There has been no shortage of complaints about the facilities at Suvarnabhumi Airport and the corrupt practices involved in building it. Much of the blame for both belongs to the politicians who ordered it to be opened for full service before it was ready.

This premature birth guaranteed that the glitches that would normally plague any huge new technical operation of this complexity would be greatly increased and, sure enough, they were. The scarcity of seats and toilets, inadequate signposting and lighting, mismarked baggage conveyor belts, rampant pestering touts, arrival hall crush, taxi mismanagement, lax security, poor working conditions for immigration staff and uncontrolled noise pollution, among other things, were all so predictable they could easily have been averted by proper planning before, instead of panic measures after, the airport opened. Just observing passenger flows at Don Muang would have pinpointed obvious problem areas. What we can take great comfort in is that there have been no safety issues. A lack of professionalism might be evident in some aspects of the airport management, but not in the air traffic control and ''airside'' ground control operations. These controllers are the best in the business and the on-time arrival and departure times speak for themselves.

But no praise is due to those who skimped on such modern-day necessities as attending to the needs of disabled passengers, many of them tourists. The opinions and recommendations made by representatives of the disabled during the airport design and construction phases appear to have been largely ignored. This is in total contrast to the disabled-friendly subway system where everyone worked together and succeeded in getting it right.

So what happened at Suvarnabhumi? Why are toilets for the disabled located at the back of restrooms where wheelchair users experience great difficulty in getting to them? Why were their concerns that parts of the walkways were hazardous because they were slippery apparently not acted on? Why did no representative of the now-deposed Thaksin government consult with representatives of the disabled, despite many requests, to help plan the special facilities needed? And why did representatives of the disabled get so desperate they felt they had to resort to filing a lawsuit in the Administrative Court against those politicians who had neglected their plight?

The group behind this action, led by Lt-Col Torpong Kulkhanchit, chief of the Asia-Pacific Office of the International Handicapped Organisation, says it was fed up with having its petitions and requests ignored and worried about the dangers. It cited certain air-conditioning vents in the passenger terminal as constituting a hazard to children and those with poor vision as there were neither warning signs nor detectable special floor tiles with tactile surfaces to alert people. They also expressed concern about the stairs in the terminal having steel-wire guard rails with gaps they said were big enough for a child to slip through and the lack of any transport service at the airport specifically catering to the needs of the disabled.

The Association of the Disabled of Thailand predicts the airport will fail its first big test when the country hosts the 9th Asian ParaGames next year if faults are not fixed in time. They may well be because attitudes have changed since the coup and efforts are now being made to rectify all the costly blunders that could so easily have been avoided.

This is of particular relevance this week because on Tuesday Thailand, to its great credit, voted to support a United Nations convention to protect the rights of some 650 million people around the world with disabilities. The pact, regarded as the first major human rights treaty this century, will come into force when 20 of the 192 UN member states ratify it.

There is an enormous amount of work to be done to meet the standards required of the disabled-friendly nation we aspire to be. And, if we want to learn from our mistakes, we need go no further than the airport to find out how.

Suvarnabarrassment

It's interesting that despite the almost universal uproar about Suvarnabhumi Airport's toilets and other facilities, nothing is being done to correct even the easiest problems. Instead, one is regularly bombarded by radio and TV ads extolling the greatness of the new airport as a symbol of Thai pride. I suppose the goal is that if you hear them enough times, you will begin to believe that the airport isn't really that big a national embarrassment after all.

Here's a recent opinion piece in the good old Bangkok Post. We couldn't agree more.

Flaws at new airport need fixing
Boonsong Kositchotethana
Bangkok Post, 7 December 2006

More than two months have passed since the opening of Suvarnabhumi Airport on Sept 28, and it is a pity that many of the facility's drawbacks don't seem to be getting fixed. Unresolved problems which have irked travellers and those whose work evolve around the airport have grown in such magnitude that many are disgusted at the idea of going through, or working at, the airport. Judging from the hundreds of letters to newspapers and websites almost every day lamenting the hassles, and the news stories and editorials in many media detailing the airport's deficiencies and scandals, clearly not enough is being done to improve Bangkok's new international airport.

My recent personal visit to Suvarnabhumi served to confirm that little has indeed been done to correct the flaws, which unfortunately have given the facility a bad name internationally, rather than being the ''pride of Thailand''. There have been statements made by Transport Minister Theera Haocharoen and the Airports of Thailand Plc's (AoT) new board chairman Gen Saprang Kalayanamitr about the need to urgently address the problems, but the public has not seen any real action being taken.

It is a shame that some very easy fixes _ like enlarging display fonts, posting plentiful correct direction signs in locations where people can clearly see them, and adding more foreign languages such as Mandarin to the signage _ have not been carried out, even though these problems were identified well before the airport's opening. Many of the airport's restrooms are a disgrace to the country (which recently hosted the World Toilet Expo and Forum), with flushes not working properly, broken water taps, the absence of toilet paper and dirty, wet floors.

That is so much easier to tackle than building over 200 additional toilets at the airport, which AoT president Chotisak Asapaviriya has vowed to do, in the wake of scathing criticism from passengers and the public over the insufficiency of toilets there. It will take a while before these new toilets will be in service.

Several spots at the terminal are littered with rubbish discarded by construction workers and others working at the airport, due to the lack of cleaning and garbage collection. The area in front of the terminal has become extremely dirty, with cigarette butts and discarded chewing gum on the pavements. A poor welcome to a country.

Very poor lighting and the expanses of unpainted concrete make the terminal look so drab, and make working conditions for immigration officers difficult _ little wonder it takes so long for them to process passports. Poor lighting has also contributed to the recent spate of complaints from female employees on night shifts about being sexually harassed by construction workers and security guards. Why can't the AoT quickly install more lights where they are needed, and paint the walls and ceiling white to mitigate the problems?

Air-conditioning is another problem-plagued area which needs immediate attention, as it has been hot and sweaty on the top floor of the terminal and along the main walkways between terminal arms.

The public continues to put up with the lack of comfort, as the chairs there are only steel-framed with no padding, and cold!

One can witness the premature breakdown of the terminal's facilities. Lifts get stuck and the revolving doors at the terminal's entrances do not operate properly.

What I have dwelt on so far are just some of the fixes which can be done quicker than the mountains of bigger improvements, like widening the egress for arriving passengers and constructing more restrooms _ if the AoT is really serious about correcting the flaws.

It is good news that the AoT's new chairman, Gen Saprang, has ordered all relevant contracts, fraught with alleged widespread corruption, to be examined and made available for public vetting.

But as important as netting the crooks, Gen Saprang should make the improvements at the airport a top priority, as well as making AoT management and other parties involved such as contractors, suppliers and designers accountable for the flaws at Suvarnabhumi.

Boonsong Kositchotethana is Deputy Assignment Editor (Business), Bangkok Post.