After the grief, questions remain for airline operators

THE sight of distraught relatives consumed by grief after being told there was no hope of finding anyone alive from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight made uncomfortable viewing.
Relatives of Chinese passengers aboard the Malaysia Airlines, MH370 shout in protests as another reads out a statement calling for Malaysia Airlines and Malaysia's government to be held accountableRelatives of Chinese passengers aboard the Malaysia Airlines, MH370 shout in protests as another reads out a statement calling for Malaysia Airlines and Malaysia's government to be held accountable
Relatives of Chinese passengers aboard the Malaysia Airlines, MH370 shout in protests as another reads out a statement calling for Malaysia Airlines and Malaysia's government to be held accountable

The news was made public by the Malaysian prime minister who said satellite data indicated the plane, with 239 passengers and crew on board, crashed into a remote corner of the Indian Ocean. For many of the relatives, whose suffering has been played out in the full glare of the world’s media, it was simply all too much.

It’s now nearly three weeks since Flight MH370 disappeared shortly after take-off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8. Search teams from 26 nations have pored over radar data and scoured a vast area with advanced aircraft and ships, yet they still haven’t been able to locate the plane. Mark Binskin, vice-chief of the Australian Defence Force, highlighted the scale of the challenge yesterday when he said: “We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack. We’re still trying to define where the haystack is.”

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At the moment there are still many unanswered questions and the fact that a passenger aircraft can seemingly disappear without trace has raised concerns about the systems we have in place to monitor commercial flights.

Dr Rashid Ali is a pilot and a senior lecturer in aviation at Sheffield Hallam University. He says satellite technology already exists to trace the whereabouts of aircraft and what is needed is an international agreement to make sure that all commercial aircraft use it.

“What we are looking at is a mechanism that can make the information from the aircraft available in real time at designated spots on the ground, rather than having to rely on the flight data recorder.

“We’re talking about software modifications and some systems being put in place, we’re not reinventing the wheel,” he says.

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“But I believe legislation changes are needed in order to make the skies safer.”

The commercial aircraft monitoring system revolves around land-based radar as well as a secondary radar on the plane that sends out a signal pinpointing its location, but this, like its separate communications system, can be shut down in the cockpit.

David Kaminsky-Morrow, the air transport editor at Flight International, says the case of the missing Malaysian Airlines plane has shown the limitations of the existing monitoring system. “It has shown that the system we have in place is not invulnerable, but it is still pretty good most of the time.”

He says introducing any additional tracking systems could be expensive and would need to meet tight aircraft regulations. “You would need an independent tracking system above and beyond what we already have that satisfies safety requirements.”

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He points out that it isn’t the same as simply having GPS on your mobile phone. “It’s more complex than that, so can you turn it off if it starts sending out bad data, or if there are electronic problems?”

As well as calls for better satellite tracking systems, questions have been raised about whether improvements can be made to the flight recorder – known as the black box – on aircraft. There are actually two boxes, a cockpit voice recorder and a data recorder.

The black box sends out a “ping” that acts as a beacon and following the Air France flight that crashed into the Atlantic in 2009, guidelines were issued that the ping should last 90 days to give search teams longer to find it. However, on some aircraft, like MH370, this only lasts 30 days.

There are many pressing challenges ahead, but for the relatives of passengers on the ill-fated Malaysian Airlines flight the most important concern is finding out exactly what happened to their loved ones.