In a world where Google can track your whereabouts and keep tabs on your shopping habits, and police use simple mobile phone technology to pinpoint locations of emergency calls, how can a high-tech aircraft designed to deal with all possible emergencies just fall off the grid?
The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 on March 8 last year has proven to be one of the most confounding aviation mysteries in history. All that investigators know for now is this: whoever was operating MH370 went to great lengths to avoid being detected by shutting off the plane’s transponder and a text-to-ground messaging system before turning the Boeing 777-200 off its course to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board.
As the needle-in-haystack search for the missing flight is already the longest in modern commercial aviation history, the unprecedented disaster has exposed serious communications gaps and technology shortcomings at 35,000ft cruising altitude.
MH370 had an underwater locator beacon whose battery had expired in December 2012, according to an interim report on March 8. The flight was also carrying 221kg of lithium-ion batteries that didn’t undergo the routine security screening, the 584-page report said.
On the face of it, the solution might seem simple: extend the use of modern technology to track airliners. A year after MH370 disappeared over the Indian Ocean, however, regulators, safety advocates and the airline industry can’t agree on what is best. The US National Transportation Safety Board has recommended tamper-proof devices to transmit the location of crashes with enhanced flight data for investigators. But proposals under consideration, at least initially, don’t include that.
With the exception of MH370, no passenger airliners have completely disappeared since 1962. And there are few examples to show beefed up tracking would have helped locate wreckage, let alone prevented the crashes. It took two years to find an Air France flight that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. Some airlines are now questioning whether the first disappearance of a passenger flight in more than 50 years justifies the exorbitant cost of a technology overhaul.
There are other pressing safety issues too, for sure. There were 72 fatal accidents killing 3,986 people on large airliners from 2004 through 2013, according to Boeing data. More than 80% of the deaths involved pilots losing control, striking the ground during routine flight or botched takeoffs and landings. And globally, 2014 could be the worst for passenger fatalities since 2005, according to air-safety consultants Ascend Worldwide.
“If we spend a significant amount of money for each of the operators for tracking, is it at the expense of more needed safety initiatives?” asked John Cox, chief executive officer of aviation consulting company Safety Operating Systems.
Sonar-equipped submersibles have swept through more than 26,000sq km of the ocean floor where MH370 is believed to have crashed. So far, they have found no trace of the wreckage. Tony Abbott, Prime Minister of Australia, which has been leading efforts to locate debris in some of the deepest and most remote parts of the Indian Ocean, said last Sunday he’s reasonably confident the plane would eventually be found.
But for the families and friends of the missing passengers and crew, it’s just been an agonising wait. No one knows for sure if it will end.
