Aviation authority notes lapse in Malaysian military’s role over MH370

A recent paper by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has noted the failure of Malaysia's military in communicating information about Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 as it went off course its route, but a year since the plane vanished, it is still unclear if any official has been held accountable for the lapse.

As a result of the delay - some 20 hours before civil aviation authorities were informed and a week before the information was publicly released - the paper said valuable time was lost during the initial search for the plane which disappeared on March 8 last year.

Flight MH370 and 239 people on board remain missing despite a massive undersea search in the southern Indian Ocean.

"PSR (primary surveillance radar) information from Malaysian military PSR and the two PSRs in Thailand at Hat Yai (near the Thai-Malaysian border) and Phuket (Bang Duk Hill) that could have observed the westbound track of MH370 were not provided to civilian authorities during the immediate period following the disappearance.

"The Malaysian military PSR information was not publicly released for approximately a week after the disappearance," the paper titled "ICAO Brief on the SAR Response to MH370 said" (SAR stands for search and rescue).

The paper, available online from the ICAO website, was presented at the Third Meeting of the Asia/Pacific Regional Search and Rescue Task Force in the Maldives in January.

In a timeline of MH370's disappearance, ICAO noted that the plane's "final primary radar fix" in the Andaman Sea at 2:22am was information that "would not be divulged to civil authorities for another 20 hours".

Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein had defended the Malaysian military for not scrambling its fighter jets after spotting flight MH370 veering off its course, saying it was pointless to do so if the intention was not to shoot down the plane. – AFP file pic, March 7, 2015.The paper noted that improvements were needed to the cooperation between civil aviation and military authorities for the Asia Pacific Search and Rescue Plan.

This was because Thai military radar had also tracked MH370 as it flew west and then northwest over the Andaman sea, but had received no advice on whether action should be taken.

"It is apparent that a higher degree of Malaysian civil/military coordination may have revealed the possibility of the MH370 course reversal much earlier after the initial alert advice from Vietnam, and as the hypothesised track also crossed Thailand’s PSR coverage, advice to Thailand may have also proved beneficial.

"In essence, a week or more was lost in the initial search because of poor civil/military cooperation," ICAO said.

The ICAO brief on the SAR response to MH370, however, qualified its findings and improvement proposed as suggestions for consideration and comments at the January meeting.

The lack of military action was a major grievance of the families of those onboard the Beijing-bound flight, after it was revealed that Malaysian military radar had spotted the plane making an air turn-back across the peninsula and around Penang, but did not scramble jets to investigate.

Two months later, then acting transport minister Datuk Seri Hishammudddin Hussein had told the  Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in an interview  that the Malaysian military had been told to keep an eye on the plane but allowed it to disappear off their radar after considering it to be non-hostile.

In the interview, Hishammuddin said the military did not send a plane up to investigate as "it was not deemed a hostile object and pointless if you are not going to shoot it down".

He had said this in defence of the military’s failure to scramble fighter jets after flight MH370 had disappeared from civilian radar on March 8, when its transponder stopped transmitting around 1.21am during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The military radar tracked it after it made a turn-back and turned in a westerly direction across the peninsula.

"If you're not going to shoot it down, what's the point of sending it (a fighter) up?" Hishammuddin, who is also the defence minister, had told ABC.

Recently, Transport Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai told The Malaysian Insider to "wait for the outcome of the investigation’s report", when asked if any Malaysian officials had been held responsible for the plane's disappearance.

With the jetliner still missing, the current ongoing search in the southern Indian Ocean has not yielded any sign of the wreckage.

The  search in the remote area is expected to end in May, according to the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) in Australia which handles information related to the search.

On January 29 this year, the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation announced that the plane was lost in an accident and all on board were presumed dead.

- TMI