KUALA LUMPUR: One year since Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished, the plane’s whereabouts has remained a mystery, as does the nagging question — why can’t anyone be held responsible?
Scrutiny of the timeline of events after the Boeing-777 disappeared from radar on March 8, 2014 revealed gaps in communication and a lapse of judgment, in particular by the military, which saw the plane on primary surveillance radar, but did nothing to investigate why it had flown off course.
Malaysian military officials revealed on March 12 that an unidentified aircraft, believed to be MH370, had travelled across the peninsula after doing an air turn-back, and was last sighted on military radar 370km northwest of Penang.
Following this, the search area was then expanded from the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea to include the Strait of Malacca.
It was reported then that senior military officers only became aware of the radar data after news of the aircraft’s disappearance had spread.
“Clearly, they had let an unidentified aircraft pass through Malaysian sovereign territory without bothering to identify it; not something they were happy to admit,” aviation consultant David Learmount said.
“There was clearly a significant failure of response on behalf of the Malaysian air force. There’s no real way around it and you might imag-
ine heads would roll for that,” Bangkok-based analyst for defence-and-security-intelligence firm IHS-Jane, Anthony Davis, was quoted as saying in a report by Time.
Veteran DAP leader Lim Kit Siang also called for “heads to roll”, demanding that an inquiry be launched to seek accountability for the plane’s disappearance and subsequent response.
Renewing his calls for accountability, the Gelang Patah MP said no one had been brought to book for the grave error that could have saved millions of ringgit and given the families of the 239 on board the closure they need. “This only highlights the need to hold an inquiry through the setting up of a Parliamentary Select Committee to look into the incident,” he added.
Lim said then that one of the areas that should be investigated was whether the disappearance of the jet could have been averted if military radar operators had been more vigilant and had acted promptly.
DAP’s Bukit Mertajam MP Steven Sim also attempted to learn more about the military radar which detected MH370 in Parliament but his queries were rejected as such information was deemed “secret”.
He also asked if there was any follow-up action on the lack of emergency response in the early hours when the aircraft went missing but was shot down.
Speaking to The Malaysian Insider recently ahead of the first anniversary of MH370’s disappearance yesterday, Sim expressed his disappointment in Putrajaya for its lack of concern over the errors that had contributed to the plane’s whereabouts still being a mystery.
“Before Parliament convenes next week, I urge the prime minister to do several things to show his commitment towards truth, justice and closure for MH370.
“He has to answer if there was any audit conducted on the tragedy, especially with regard to the government standard operating procedure, given the reported negligence such as the lack of response after the loss of communication with MH370 and the lack of response after military radar detected a so-called unidentified flying object moments after MH370 went off communication,” Sim said.
He said he had called for a post-mortem report to be tabled in Parliament but this was never done.
In the absence of any admission of wrongdoing or negligence by the Malaysian authorities, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has noted the failure of Malaysia’s military to communicate information about MH370 as it went off course.
In a paper presented in January at the Third Meeting of the Asia/Pacific Regional Search and Rescue Task Force in the Maldives, ICAO said the delay had resulted in the loss of valuable time in the initial search for the plane.
It was some 20 hours before civil aviation authorities were informed and a week before the information that military radar had detected MH370 flying north of Pulau Perak in the Strait of Malacca was released, the paper noted.
“Primary surveillance radar (PSR)information from Malaysian military and the two PSRs in Thailand at Hat Yai (near the Thai-Malaysian border) and Phuket (Bang Duk Hill) that could have observed the west-bound track of MH370 were not provided to civilian authorities during the immediate period following the disappearance,” the paper titled “ICAO brief on the SAR response to MH370” said.
Though the ICAO paper did not mention the need to scramble jets, it noted the lack of cooperation between military and civil aviation authorities.— The Malaysian Insider
This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on March 9, 2015.