If it were not for the background of tragedy, the loss of a deep-water detector looking for the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 would be funny. Now the finders must find their finding machine, which is believed to lie four and a half kilometers down on the Indian Ocean floor. The Australian team operating the device, known as a tow fish, say that it collided with a mud volcano that rises more than two kilometers from the seabed. It might be wondered how such a sophisticated piece of equipment, able to detect relatively small piece of wreckage, could manage to crash into something to huge as this volcano. But this is probably being unfair.
The continuing search for MH370, which disappeared almost two years ago with 239 passengers and crew on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, is both entirely right and deeply admirable. It is not simply the need to bring closure for the thousands of grieving relatives and friends of the victims that makes this operation so important. There is also the need for the aviation industry to understand precisely what went wrong. If it was indeed a pilot who went berserk, then lessons have to be learnt to avoid such a tragedy happening again. At the very least tracking devices that cannot be disabled from onboard need to be fitted to all aircraft. Almost exactly a year later the young copilot of a German Wings airliner deliberately flew it into an Alpine mountain killing all 150 people on board. It is now clear that the pilot was locked out of the cockpit and unable to get back in to stop his young assistant from this act of mass murder. Airlines are already tightening up their psychological screening of serving pilots and many have introduced mandatory drugs tests.
The issue with MH360 and the German Wings Flight 4U 9525 is that safety is paramount for the airline industry. Indeed, even though single aircraft crashes tend to involve significant loss of life, including among people struck on the ground, per passenger mile, air travel remains the safest form of transport. Besides the time and inconvenience of road travel, no one in their right mind would wish to drive on the Kingdom’s highly dangerous roads when there is the alternative of an internal flight.
Safety indeed has become a cult with airline bosses. IATA, the International Air Transport Association regularly blacklists carriers and indeed airports that do not meet its exacting standards. Informed by the advanced technology and fail-safe systems that go into space programs, those who control the conduct of airlines mandate strict rules and standards. And unlike the slippery international banking system, there is no reliance on self-policing. Inspections are regular and ruthless. An engineer who is not happy with the airworthiness of any aircraft, however minor the defect, can and will stop that plane from flying. Despite the commercial pressures of getting flights away in time and the inevitable fury of delayed passengers, there are no ifs and buts. If a plane is not fit to fly, it stays on the ground until it is fixed.
Such exhaustive attention to detail is what lies behind the Australians’ dogged and extremely expensive search for the wreckage of flight MH370. And this is absolutely as it should be.
