There were 239 people on board.
“Good night. Malaysia 370.”
These six words were the last radio broadcast from the cockpit of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 less than an hour after it flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing late at night on March 8, 2014. Minutes later, the plane disappeared from air traffic. Control the radar screen.
The giant Boeing 777 jet, nearly as long as a Manhattan block and taller than a five-story building, somehow became invisible in the clear night sky. There were 239 people on board.
Subsequent search operations combed some of the deepest seafloor in the desolate southern Indian Ocean hundreds of miles off Australia’s west coast and found no trace of the main fuselage or any of its passengers and crew. Of the 777’s three million parts, only a handful of fragments washed up on the East African coast years later.
With no distress call, no known flight path, and no wreckage, MH370 remains the greatest mystery of modern aviation. Although investigators made little progress, they knew one thing: A plane must never go missing like this again.
Yet a decade on, industry-wide efforts to rule out similar situations have been stymied by bureaucracy, financial pressures and disputes over who should have final control of the cockpit, under regulatory amendments that documented the process over the years. .
A key aircraft tracking tool proposed by Malaysian authorities weeks after the disaster has yet to be implemented. While the industry has saved hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment costs, ocean-sized holes in aviation safety protocols remain, meaning a doomed airliner could remain hidden in a remote corner of the planet forever.
As search teams have been unsuccessful in finding MH370, another layer of safety oversight led by the International Civil Aviation Organization has recommended that new planes broadcast their position at least every minute if they are in trouble. The purpose is to provide authorities with early warning of a disaster. If the plane crashes later, rescue teams will at least have a chance of finding the crash site.
but it is not the truth. The one-minute tracking rule has been postponed twice. The regulation was originally scheduled to take effect in January 2021, but is now scheduled to take effect in January 2025. Bloomberg News asked a dozen major airlines in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia how many aircraft in their fleets already meet ICAO requirements. Of the airlines that responded, few aircraft met the requirements.
Air France, which had more than 250 aircraft in its fleet as of September, said seven aircraft, all Airbus SE A350s, met the standard. Korean Air said three of its 159 aircraft were equipped with tracking devices, while Japan Airlines said two of its 226 aircraft had the technology installed.
Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, said the delays since MH370’s disappearance were unacceptable. The Flight Safety Foundation is a Virginia-based nonprofit organization that promotes aviation safety standards. “This is a tragedy and solutions are already in place. It is absolutely necessary that we take this final step,” Shahidi said.
Not only is the new tracking standard a few years late, but it only applies to new aircraft. As of last year, there were more than 20,000 older aircraft in service that did not require the installation of related technologies. That means thousands of planes will be flying for decades, carrying millions of passengers around the world, without the capabilities that were deemed vital after MH370’s disappearance.
Technical hurdles are at least partly responsible for the delays. In 2015, when the National Transportation Safety Board recommended installing “tamper-proof” tracking systems on planes, the Federal Aviation Administration, seen as a leader in the global civil aviation industry, objected. The FAA said this cannot be done without sacrificing pilot control of all systems, which is considered a pillar of aviation safety protocols because pilots should have the final say on the aircraft during an emergency.
The role of MH370 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah has been a major focus of the mystery. According to the sequence of events speculated in the final report, the plane deliberately deviated from its planned route north to China, circled back over Malaysia, and then headed out to sea. It sailed south for about six hours, possibly crashing into the southern Indian Ocean when it ran out of fuel.
Scientists managed to roughly map the plane’s course by studying its hourly connections with satellites 36,000 kilometers (22,400 miles) above Earth. While this detective work is excellent, it also creates a huge potential crash zone. An international search fleet surveyed 710,000 square kilometers of ocean floor, dotted with trenches and mountain peaks, before calling off the search in 2017. The following year, new efforts by ocean exploration company Ocean Infinity also came up empty.
The forensic details contained in the 450-page final report on the tragedy make it difficult to escape the human toll of the tragedy. The report listed the passenger’s seat number, gender and nationality. The economy class was almost full, with two children on the 17th and 18th floors, another child on 30H, and two babies on board. Four rows away in the back were two Iranians traveling on stolen European passports.
Business class was only one-third full, with most of the ten passengers seated by the window. The 10 flight attendants serving guests are all from Malaysia, while most of the passengers are Chinese. Just after 1 a.m., the flight entered its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. About 20 minutes later, MH370 made its final voice transmission, ending Malaysian air traffic control.
Investigators said someone may have subsequently shut down the plane’s communications system, but no firm conclusion was drawn. They said the team was “unable to determine the true cause of MH370’s disappearance”.
At the same time, the report makes an impassioned appeal to the international aviation community, saying “the traveling public needs to be reassured that the position of current generation commercial aircraft is known at all times. Failure to do so is unacceptable”.
The one-minute tracking rule aims to address this blind spot, aiming to pinpoint the crash site within a six-nautical-mile radius.
That’s not good enough, said APS Aerospace Corp. CEO Mike Poole. APS Aerospace Corp. is an Ottawa-based company that specializes in flight data analysis for accident investigations. With satellites covering nearly every inch of the Earth, Poole wants all commercial flights to be able to transmit their location and other critical data almost continuously via tamper-proof systems. He said it didn’t matter whether the plane was in trouble.
“If an airplane goes missing, not only do you know where it is, you have a lot of instant information,” said Poole, who has worked for the Transportation Safety Board of Canada for more than 20 years and leads the board’s flight recorders at the laboratory. “You probably have a good idea of what happened to MH370.”
Finding missing planes is important because understanding the causes of past events is crucial to preventing future disasters. The FAA maintains an online library of lessons learned from decades of accidents.
After the disappearance of MH370 in 2014, there was a flurry of activity. Within a month, aviation trade group International Air Transport Association established a working group to draft proposals for stricter flight monitoring. Boeing, Airbus and ICAO, the United Nations agency responsible for setting aviation standards, are included. One outcome of this early work is a requirement that from January 1, 2021, large new passenger aircraft in distress transmit their position at least once a minute.
Meeting this deadline is beyond the scope of the industry. In a four-page submission to ICAO in 2019, Australian authorities claimed there was a “lack of coordination and information sharing” between the Montreal-based ICAO and search and rescue entities. One-minute tracking was subsequently postponed to 2023. Tracking rules were pushed back to 2025 when the coronavirus disrupted air travel and sent hundreds of newly built, undelivered aircraft into warehouses.
A 2022 submission from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency revealed the financial benefits of the second delay. The European Aviation Safety Agency document said the International Coordinating Committee of the Aerospace Industry Association, which represents aircraft manufacturers, asked ICAO to delay. EASA said it expects cost savings of $175 million to $262 million, below the list price of the new Boeing 777.
Meanwhile, the European Aviation Safety Agency admitted that satellite networks’ technology to handle emergency signals is facing “significant delays” because the satellites needed to monitor the entire globe are not yet fully operational. Entities responsible for taking action when distress reports occur also need time to establish processes for handling such incidents, the report said.
Montreal-based ICCAIA declined to comment. An Airbus spokesman declined to comment on the delays, citing filings with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). “The pandemic has brought everyone back,” ICAO said in an email. ICAO said older aircraft may one day have to be equipped with aircraft-in-distress tracking equipment “depending on the importance and performance of the new equipment”.
Boeing said it will continue to “operate in accordance with the requirements of the global aviation distress and safety system under the supervision of global regulators.”
To be sure, airlines have stepped up their tracking capabilities to some extent after the MH370 incident, pinpointing large passenger planes at least every 15 minutes over remote waters.
“Safety work never ends,” said Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association. “When something like MH370 happens, I think it really makes everyone take a step back and say, ‘How could this happen?’ Could this happen again? I would be very surprised if I could. I’m not saying the likelihood is zero, but it’s much less likely today than it was 10 years ago.”
Off-the-shelf products are available that continuously track commercial flights. For example, Inmarsat and Aireon provide operators with near-real-time in-flight data using satellite networks that can connect to aircraft virtually anywhere in the world in high-precision, real-time.
This means that a situation like the 2009 crash of Air France 447 – which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean and was only discovered two years later without suspicion of foul play – could theoretically never happen again.
ICAO has set out clear requirements for one-minute in-flight tracking devices for troubled planes. They need to be activated under a range of circumstances, such as loss of propulsion. Importantly, automatically triggered devices cannot be turned off manually.
Airbus has launched a standards-compliant emergency locator transmitter system and will install it on all new wide-body aircraft delivered by the aircraft manufacturer from April 2023.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did not have this capability.
Joe Hattley, an Australian air crash expert who joined the international investigation team in Malaysia after MH370 disappeared, said the mystery still shrouded him even 10 years later. While the incident had the hallmarks of an intentional act, he was frustrated by the lack of evidence.
“I think about MH370 every day,” Hartley said. “As an accident investigator, your job is to answer questions, provide answers for family, friends and next of kin and try to improve safety. We’re not there yet.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
