MH370 Two Years Later: Has the Industry Changed?
It’s anniversary time, but March 8 won’t be a happy day to reminisce.
Two years ago, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (MH370), a Boeing 777, disappeared from the night skies over the South China Sea on what should have been a routine flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. All 239 people aboard disappeared along with the airplane.
Only one confirmed piece of MH370 wreckage has been located, a section of the 777′ s flap that washed ashore near Reunion Island last year, some 4000 miles west of where an intensive search operation has been combing the ocean floor for nearly two years.
The theories about what happened to this airplane are as varied as the beer and wine probably consumed before most of those theories went public. Me, I have no idea what happened to the flight.
Lessons Learned?
What’s crucial for our industry however, is understanding what steps the airlines and regulators around the world have taken over the past two years, solutions to make international travelers sleep a bit easier after their next ticket purchase.
To the surprise of a couple of local Chicago WGN-TV anchors I spoke to last week, the simple answer to what’s changed since March 2014 is not much at all. Another airliner could go missing just like MH370 because although a few plans have been released, tracking the location of an airplane anywhere on the planet is no different today than when we lost MH370.
That doesn’t mean no one is trying to solve the problem of course.
A year after the Malaysian 777 disappeared, most member states of the United Nation’s aviation arm, the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO), agreed that air traffic control anywhere on the globe should be able to receive location updates from an airliner at least every 15 minutes and once a minute if the aircraft were in distress. They’ve also recommended new methods of recovering flight data recorders from downed aircraft. But recommendations shouldn’t be confused with solutions. Some of ICAO’s newest recommendations won’t take effect until 2021. [Read more…] about MH370 Two Years Later: Has the Industry Changed?