THE ability of people in high positions in the country to get things spectacularly wrong continues to be astounding, even though it was rather expected in the wake of last Sunday's catastrophic failure of the air traffic control system.

As best as can be distilled from the numerous explanations provided so far by the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP), the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA) and the Department of Transportation (DoTr), the breakdown was embarrassingly simple. An initial power failure forced the Air Traffic Management Center (ATMC) to switch to a backup power system. That system failed, forcing a switch to a second backup system, which also failed.