Malaysia PM Calls For Real-time Aircraft Tracking, Other Measures To Prevent Another MH370-like Mishap

Malaysia's Prime Minister, Najib Razak, has urged international aviation regulators to implement real-time tracking of airliners to prevent another mishap similar to the disappearance of MH370. He also admitted “missteps” in the early days of the airplane's disappearance.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Razak accepted that a chaotic and slow start to the search and rescue operations in the early days of the crisis turned out to be a blunder. Consequently, he called for changes that "would make it harder for an aircraft to simply disappear and easier to find any aircraft that did."

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) arranged a meeting earlier this week to consider demands for real-time tracking of aircraft, Cloud storage of Black Box data and other possible measures.

"One of the most astonishing things about this tragedy is the revelation that an airliner (of) the size of a Boeing 777 can vanish, almost without a trace," the PM wrote. "In an age of smartphones and mobile Internet, real-time tracking of commercial airplanes is long overdue."

He also said that regulators should amend communication systems in order to prevent them from being manually shut down.

MH370's transponder and Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting Systems (ACARS) were allegedly shut down before the plane went missing.

Some of the changes under consideration were first proposed after the Air France Flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic in 2009, killing 228 people. However, there has not been much progress in this regard.

"These changes may not have prevented the MH370 or Air France 447 tragedy. But they would make it harder for an aircraft to simply disappear and easier to find any aircraft that did," noted Razak.

"The global aviation industry must not only learn the lessons of MH370, but also implement them. The world learnt from Air France but didn't act. The same mistake must not be made again."

MH370, with 239 people on board, went missing on March 8. Despite an international search operation, no trace has been found yet.
"In the passage of time, I believe, Malaysia will be credited for doing its best under near-impossible circumstances," the prime minister wrote.

He, however, admitted that they "didn't get everything right" and said his government would probe why Malaysian air-traffic controllers took four hours to launch a search operation.
Image: Thinkstock