The tragedy that struck the Malaysian Airlines aircraft
MH370 with 239 passengers and crew on board it on 8 March 2014 has been worse
compounded by the fact that there is still no certainty as to
what caused the aircraft to simply disappear or where the plane’s wreckage
probably is. With every passing day, the families of the passengers on-board
the ill-fated flight have to battle the pain and trauma of not getting closure
even as, at last count, 26 countries had pooled their resources to search for
the remains of the aircraft.
This one incident alone has brought home the limits of what
technology can do to make aviation industry safer or resolve the unanswered
questions that continue to bedevil investigators in Malaysia and beyond. Is it
even possible in the 21st century that technology is failing us in locating the
wreckage of the aircraft or in piecing together the circumstances leading up to
and after its disappearance? Several conspiracy theories have been doing the
rounds, almost on a daily basis: Could it be a terrorist act, sabotage, hijack
or a technical glitch? There are no immediate answers to these puzzling
questions. For his part, Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia has said that
the aircraft’s main communications and transponder had been deliberately shut
off. “… these movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the
plane,” Mr Najib said.
On the face of it, the Indian government has treated the
incident as another airline crash, although five Indian nationals were aboard
that MH370 flight. What is disconcerting is not the manner in which the Indian
government has chosen to respond to the tragedy but the apparent, cavalier,
handling of the incident which could have ended in an even worse tragedy if, as
a former United States diplomat Strobe Talbott has argued, the plane could have
been hijacked for a 9/11-type attack on an Indian city. Talbott said on his
Twitter account: “Malaysian plane mystery: Direction, fuel load & range now
lead some to suspect hijackers planned a 9/11-type attack on an Indian city.”
He then tweeted a second theory to say that the hijackers were headed towards
India but crashed just like the third plane involved in the 11 September 2001
attacks in the US. “Malaysian#370 as hijack: 1 of many theories. Speculation:
hijackers headed toward India but crashed like UA#93 on 9/11,” Talbott tweeted.
The mere possibility of someone actually pulling off such an
audacious attack on India should be reason enough for alarm bells to ring in
the Indian security establishment. “What if,” is a question that cannot and
must not be rejected out of hand. There is also the larger issue about how
little aviation authorities worldwide have learnt from the 2001 attacks in the
US. In a chapter on aviation security written for the book “How did this
happen?” published by the Washington-based think tank Council on Foreign
Relations a few months after the 2001 attacks in the US, American writer Gregg
Easterbrook highlighted the vulnerabilities in the way aircraft transponders
operate. “If the transponders had not gone silent on 9/11, air traffic
controllers would have quickly realised that two jetliners en route to Los
Angeles had made dramatic course changes and were bound straight for Manhattan.
Instead, controllers lost precious time trying to figure out where the aircraft
were. At the time, I would have bet my life’s savings that the transponder,
which broadcasts an aircraft’s location and identity, would be re-engineered to
prevent hijackers from turning such units off. But nothing was done. Almost 13
years later, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 sparked a lengthy worldwide search
when, it appears, another transponder was turned off. The issue today is
exactly as it was on 9/11,” Easterbrook wrote in a recent article.
At the time of writing, the international team hunting for
the aircraft in the southern Indian Ocean has not recovered anything.
