IRRESPONSIBLE MINISTER! We didn’t go thru' Sept 11- Hisham defends MH370 radar slip

KUALA LUMPUR - As Malaysia was not in a “war mode”, the military did not intercept Flight MH370 upon spotting the commercial jet on its radar, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said today.

The acting transport minister also said the Malaysia Airlines plane was not heading towards the federal administrative capital of Putrajaya, when pointed out that terrorists had hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center in the US in the September 11 attack in 2001.

“At the end of the day, even Angus Houston said even Australia is not in a war mode,” Hishammuddin said in an interview with a few newspapers here today on MH370, referring to the Australian former air marshal appointed as chief coordinator in the multi-nation search for Flight MH370.

“And even if we scramble our Sukhois, are we really going to shoot down our own commercial airliner?” he added, referring to Malaysia’s fighter jets.

Hishammuddin, who is also defence minister, pointed out that the US was not in a “war mode” before the September 11 terrorist attack.

“And now the reason why they’re in that mode is because of September 11, but we didn’t go through September 11. You want our pilots to be on standby like in the US? Because the commercial airline was not going to Putrajaya. If that happened, probably we would do it,” he said.

Hishammuddin also questioned if other countries had scrambled their fighter jets in response to Flight MH370 as the plane crossed their airspace after inexplicably diverting from its Beijing-bound flight path.

Shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8, Flight MH370 veered off course and flew in a westerly direction across the Malaysian peninsula after dropping from civilian radar just before 1.30am.

The Boeing 777 plane carrying 239 people, however, was spotted on military radar at 2.15am, 320km northwest of Penang island off Malaysia’s west coast.

Hishammuddin acknowledged today, however, that cooperation between the military and civil aviation must be tightened.

“In other countries, non-cooperation between the military and civil aviation is more obvious,” he said, citing the US as an example.

“What I hope to do is to show that we cannot live in silos. If Malaysia is an example, this is something that the military and aviation industry globally have to understand — that we have to work together,” Hishammuddin added.

- The Malay Mail