Medan airport overwhelmed
Apriadi Gunawan, The Jakarta Post, Medan, North Sumatra
Ing-Ing, an employee of China Southern Airlines, recalled that she and her two colleagues from the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta, had to negotiate with and beg an operations manager at Medan's Polonia airport here before they were about to fly aid to Aceh recently.
She said that at first she was pessimistic that the flight would go, as she witnessed the large amount of flight delays as a result of the huge number of aircraft flying in to Aceh with tsunami relief.
The parking area for planes in the airport is limited, while the number of planes and helicopters carrying aid is huge. Polonia has been the main hub for humanitarian aid to Aceh over the last month.
Finally, after several hours of wrangling, Ing-Ing said that the airport management allowed the Chinese relief flight to take off for Aceh.
"It's not our first aid shipment to Aceh. We have sent food twice with a total of 150 tons. This is our third delivery and we are sending 50 tons of medicine and two generators. It's very urgent to send medicine because so many people are in need of it.
"It's not like we're asking for special treatment. But there have been several delays in sending this," Ing-Ing told The Jakarta Post after several meetings with local airport officials over the weekend.
The branch head of PT Angkasa Pura II airport management company, Adi Suprapto, conceded that the flight delays had been frequent since the tsunami disaster on Dec. 26.
From the first week, there was chaos at the airport as so many groups were trying to fly through Medan to get to Aceh. But the problems have been mitigated somewhat and the delays have dropped a bit, he added.
"We can't deny that about 15 percent of flights are delayed from here in Polonia, both for military or regular flights. But there has been a lot of improvement compared to the early period after the tsunami. Back then, there were many delays, some up to nine hours," Adi told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.
He added that the Angkasa Pura was trying to coordinate with each group that needs to fly through Medan.
The air traffic, Adi said, was unusually congested and hectic given the high number of very large foreign planes coming in and needing space to park while they load or unload.
Since the disaster, the average number of foreign military and regular domestic flights has been 250 daily. On Dec. 30 -- four days after the tsunami -- the number reached 279 flights. The number of flights has far surpassed the normal average of about 115 per day.
"There's no space left. The airport's parking zone capacity is actually listed at 11 Boeing 737 type planes (medium-sized jets). Now, however, there are around 15 planes parked there on any given day, including many large DC-10s and C-130 Hercules planes," said Adi.
He said it was a stressful experience for him to keep it all coordinated.
The Indonesian Military's coordinator for foreign military planes here, Rear Marshall M.B. Sidehabi, reiterated that there were many foreign military planes flying through Polonia, including those from The United States, Australia, Singapore, Russia, Malaysia, Germany, France, Japan and China.
Each and every foreign plane heading to Aceh must come to the coordination center first.
"We then set the flight time. No foreign plane can enter Aceh without our permission and coordination," Sidehabi said.
The total number of foreign flights that have flown from Polonia to Aceh was at 962 as of Sunday.
"We often encounter difficulties in keeping the flights in order, especially because they all want to enter Aceh immediately, but they have to get on the waiting list. Regardless, we never restrict them," Sidehabi declared.