The Bureau of Immigration (BI) announced the resumption of its operations at Subic Bay International Airport (SBIA), a decade after it withdrew its presence there when international flights stopped at the former United States (US) naval base.
Immigration Commissioner Jaime Morente said the BI officially returned to the SBIA on Wednesday, July 7 after a Philippine Airlines (PAL) flight, carrying 300 repatriated overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) from Saudi Arabia, landed at the airport, marking the first time an international passenger flight arrived there since 2011.
PAL’s maiden flight to Subic was supposed to land last Monday but the aircraft, which carried 309 passengers in total, had to be diverted to the Clark International Airport (CIA) due to bad weather.
Morente welcomed the resumption of international flights in Subic, saying it is an encouraging sign that international travel could slowly go back to normal after more than a year into the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
He assured PAL and other airlines that may be planning to mount similar flights to Subic that the BI would always be ready to field the sufficient number of personnel needed to facilitate the smooth conduct of immigration arrival formalities for their passengers.
BI port operations chief Carlos Capulong said a team of immigration officers, immigration supervisors, and intelligence agents currently assigned at the Clark airport have been directed to be on-call for deployment to Subic whenever there are flights scheduled to arrive there.
Capulong said the BI may decide to permanently deploy immigration personnel at Subic should international flights there become more frequent in the future.
“As of now, it is only PAL that has informed us of its intention to mount flights to Subic. We were told that this July there are four flights from Saudi Arabia that will be landing there,” Capulong said.