It was quite surprising to know that very few people in their 20s today who work at the call centers of the Asiatown IT Park in Lahug are aware that the Pope, now Saint John Paul II offered Mass there in the late afternoon and early evening of Feb. 19, 1981. Either many of them do not come from Cebu or there is nothing left of that event there. Worse, many of the current school-age generation do not even know that before IT Park, there was Lahug Airport.
When it was announced that engineers of the Ayala Land and the city government would be searching for the exact spot where the Templete for that Mass, with its very tall neon-lit crucifix made of coconut lumber (the craze of the time), was located, I immediately understood why memory of that event has not permeated into the present. There is no marker celebrating that historic celebration there.
I too saw only glimpses of Lahug Airport in my college days on my way to the Talamban Campus of the University of San Carlos. This was the time when Gaisano Country Mall was still a vineyard full of grapes and where only a small number of jeepney drivers would brave the dusty road to the campus and on to Talamban or just turn around to go back to the city after students emptied the jeepney. This was a time when it took only 5 to 7 minutes to travel from the Club Filipino golf course that is now Ayala Center Cebu to USC Talamban Campus.
But every time I passed beside the airport, I was always aware that it was the site of the first and only open-site papal mass ever in the history of Cebu. But I was not that privileged to see the airport at its heyday because, by time we escaped the war waged by Nur Misuari’s followers in Pagadian in 1973 on board a McDonnel Douglas DC 3 run by SwiftAir, Lahug Airport was already on the wane. We landed in fact at what was then called Mactan Airport and then to a Toyopet taxi that rode on a barge across Mactan Channel to reach Cebu City because the Mandaue-Mactan Bridge was still under construction at that time.
Many events other than the First Papal Mass in Cebu were held at the Lahug Airport, making me wonder why not a single reminder of that place was retained by Ayala Land when it began building Asiatown IT Park. It is quite different from the way the Ayalas preserved Nielsen Tower, the airport tower built when Ayala Avenue was nothing but a runway for bi-planes in the 1920s. Of course, there was neither whimper nor tumult when the airport tower at Lahug was demolished. There was no heritage movement to speak of back then.
Still, it would have been prudent to retain it and turn it into a restaurant, perhaps, or incorporate it into one of the structures that have not sprouted there, the way Nielsen Tower became home to Filipinas Heritage Library until last year.
What other significant event transpired at the old Lahug Airport that is worth remembering?
Well, three airplanes left this airport and crashed killing everyone on board at various times in the 40s and 1950s. The most unforgettable of them all involved Pres. Ramon Magsaysay. In the early hours of March 17, 1957 the DC-47 plane named “Mt. Pinatubo” that he and 24 other high government officials and journalists took crashed on Mt. Manunggal in Balamban, killing everyone except the journalist Nestor Mata.
Unfortunately again, no marker was installed to commemorate that sad event, even though conspiracy theorists say that there was a bomb hidden on the baskets of sweet Guadalupe mangoes that were loaded while the plane was at the airport waiting for Magsaysay to finish his meetings and the round of graduation speeches at the University of the Visayas and then at the University of San Carlos.
Such is the role played by an unremembered and uncelebrated airport that once transported both the high and mighty politicians and businessmen of Cebu and the lowly traders and visitors to the city. It is time to put something there to remind us all that once this was indeed an airport that contributed to the growth of Cebu. I therefore urge Ayala Land to put up perhaps a small visitor’s center there showing pictures of the time when this vital piece of property was a vital part of the lifeblood of the city. Or we can all forget this part of our past.
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