Emirates chief questions inaction of Malaysian military in MH370 disappearance

The actual Boeing 777 aircraft which was MAS flight MH370 was photographed in Europe just weeks before its disappearance while on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8. - June 2, 2014.A senior airline industry executive has brought up again the lack of action by Malaysia's security forces in the critical early hours after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared three months ago.

The president of Emirates airlines, Tim Clark told the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) that in most countries the wayward aircraft would have been intercepted by fighters.

Clark questioned why flight MH370 was not immediately circled by fighter jets after Malaysia's military radar had picked up the aircraft on primary radar.

"If you were to fly from London to Oslo, and then over the North Sea you turned off and then went west to Ireland, within two minutes you'd have Tornadoes, Eurofighters... everything up around you," SMH quoted him as saying.

"Even if you did that over Australia and the US, there would be something up. I'm not quite sure where the primary radar was in all of this," he added.

"This is the door closing after the horse has gone 25 miles down the track. We need to know more about what actually happened to this aeroplane and do a forensic second by second analysis of it.

"But I still think we will find it and get to the bottom of it," he said.

Clark also believed that the industry should not change how aircraft are tracked until more facts are available as to the disappearance of MH370.

"In my view we are all plunging down a path that 'we have got to fix this'," he said in Doha, Qatar today, where the International Air Transport Association (IATA) is having its annual meeting.

According to SMH, Emirates is a major operator of Boeing 777s, the same type of aircraft as that of flight MH370. The aircraft has been widely considered one of the safest ever built.

Meanwhile, IATA chief executive Tony Tyler said the disappearance of an aircraft without a trace for so long was "unprecedented" in the history of modern aviation.

"It must not happen again," he told SMH, adding, "IATA, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and experts from around the world are working together to agree on the best options to improve global tracking capabilities."

According to SMH, a draft of recommendations would be given to ICAO in September.

Tyler also said IATA was moving forward with the Global Aviation Data Management project which would create the world's largest resource of operational information, SMH reported.

He said the focus for now was on tracking aircraft rather than real-time streaming of data because "you are going to end up with masses and masses of data" if the latter was done.

"That may be manageable, but it may not be manageable," he said.

When asked by a Chinese journalist whether he knew the cause of MH370's disappearance, Tyler said he personally had no idea what had happened and he doubted anyone else did either.

"I am currently not prepared to add to the speculation," SMH quoted him as saying.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 left Kuala Lumpur International Airport, bound for Beijing, on March 8, with 239 passengers and crew on board.

Satelite data showed that the flight had crashed into the southern Indian Ocean but a search involving several countries in that area have so far failed to locate the plane.

- TMI