Malaysia, which suffered two commercial air disasters last year after one jet disappeared and another was shot down over Ukraine, on Monday said that the UN must make reporting of risks to airlines over conflict zones mandatory.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the UN’s aviation agency, has been under pressure to come up with new systems to protect aircraft from risks in conflict zones after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down in eastern Ukraine in July last year, killing all 298 people on board.
The ICAO has proposed testing a central Web site where states and agencies could publish public warnings about conflict zones. However, the proposal does not require ICAO member states to provide information.
“We cannot delay implementing changes in the way global commercial aviation operates,” Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation Director-General Azharuddin Abdul Rahman told an ICAO assembly at a high-level safety meeting in Montreal.
He said reporting should be “mandatory and timely.”
The MH17 incident occurred during fighting between Ukraine and pro-Russian separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. The US said the plane was hit by a ground-to-air missile fired by rebels, but Russia has said that a Ukrainian military aircraft downed the jet.
The Netherlands, which lost 196 citizens aboard Flight MH17, on Monday said the ICAO plan was an important first step and called on all ICAO member states to back it.
“Flying should be associated with freedom and safety, not with luck, and airline tickets should not be a lottery ticket,” Dutch State Secretary for Infrastructure and Environment Wilma Mansveld said, adding quick action was needed on conflict zone risks.
Malaysia also said that real-time aircraft tracking must become a priority for the industry.
While real-time tracking of commercial planes would have a financial impact, it is too vital to ignore, Malaysia said in a working paper presented to the ICAO’s safety conference, which meets through tomorrow.
“We believe, based on our unfortunate experience, [it] will be offset by the benefits of enhancing the effectiveness of the alerting and search and rescue services,” the paper said.
Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared in March last year shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people aboard. A nearly year-long search, now focused on the Indian Ocean seabed off Australia’s western coast, has failed to turn up any sign of the aircraft or its flight recorders, known as black boxes.
“The disappearance of MH370 demonstrates the crucial need to improve aircraft tracking systems for the sake of safety and security,” Malaysia said in the working paper. “In this day and age, the fact that an airplane could go missing and that the flight recorders could be so difficult to recover is unacceptable.”
The airline industry is divided over the costs of installing new tracking systems.
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