Like Requiem for a Dying Airline

Philippine Daily Inquirer

Monday, September 21, 1998

By Ed Ledesma

I MISS PAL.

We sit down to an early morning breakfast every day of the year, reading a printing press-fresh Manila newspaper. Did we care to ask how it was delivered to our home?

We see foreign tourists on the streets of our city, we meet and see off relatives and friends at the airport. Did we bother to think how they came?

We board her aircraft to flights everywhere, confident and secure in the thought that she will deliver us to our destinations in comfort and on time. Did we ever look back, when disembarking, to say "thank you"?

Yes, we took her for granted that she would be there, through weather fair or foul, to fly in the food that we eat and the goods that we use, to fly out the merchandise we produce and sell to places everywhere, to ferry us in safety and in comfort and punctually to places we wish to go. Yes, we took her for granted.

Yes, until June 5 when her pilots struck and suddenly, we remembered her. We remembered her when our morning papers did not arrive for days on end, when foreign tourists disappeared from our streets, when a son, a relative, a friend woke up one morning to find himself without work. Then, suddenly, we remembered her.

Years earlier, she was an object of ridicule, much maligned, the butt of jokes. In the first years of Roman A. Cruz's presidency, she was "Plane Always Late" or "Pilay Ang Lider," a cruel allusion to Jun Cruz's limp, but mid-term of his seven-year presidency, she turned around to become "Prompt At Last."

I remember being seated, many years ago, in the departure lounge of a foreign airport, gazing out toward the empty runways, lonely and alone among an alien people, when suddenly an aircraft landed, and I caught a fleeting glimpse of the word "Philippines" in bold letters on her fuselage and the rising sun on her tail. A sense of pride swelled in my breasts and I said to myself there is my country and my flag.

Now, she is limp and prostrate. I cannot believe that it will take only one man to bring her down to her knees.

This Sunday's mid-afternoon silence was broken by the struggling roar and banshee wail of a competitor aircraft's engines straining to take off. Then, suddenly, again. I remembered her, and I felt a deep sense of sadness, as if the roar and the wail sounded a death knell for her, a requiem.

How I miss PAL. Terribly!