Mystery of MH370 hits aviation safety


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While the mystery of exactly what happened to Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 continues to puzzle everyone from rescue services and aviation officials through to the friends and families of those on board, some of the information that has emerged from the incident has been deeply unsettling because of its implications for aviation generally.

Aviation security has never been the same since the events of September 11, 2001 – and for good reason. The murderous ingenuity of a handful of zealots exposed a vulnerability that cost the lives of thousands of people. Further attempts to exploit similar weaknesses are the reason why passengers cannot carry any more than token quantities of liquids on flights and, in some countries, have to have their footwear X-rayed before being allowed on board.

For the most part, passengers endure these strictures with a weary resignation, reconciling it as being as much a part of modern aviation as jetlag and accepting it as the price of staying safe.

So when the news that MH370 was missing first emerged, most regular international travellers would have expected the flight’s progress would have been closely tracked so that where it disappeared could be precisely determined, substantially narrowing the search area. They would also have believed that no passenger would have boarded without having their passports scanned and their identities verified.

All this explains why it was so unsettling to learn that little such tracking takes place, leaving the Malaysian aviation authorities that are leading the search uncertain whether the aircraft might have crashed in the Gulf of Thailand, the South China Sea or even the Strait of Malacca, creating a mammoth search zone. That reaction was exacerbated by the news that two of the passengers were travelling on Italian and Austrian passports that had been reported stolen long before but the validity of which was not assessed during the standard check-in process at Kuala Lumpur.

When the mystery of MH370 is resolved, lessons need to be learnt from this tragedy. Simple measures such as comparing passports at check-in against Interpol’s database of lost or stolen travel documents – as the UAE, US and UK do regularly – ought to be adopted universally. This will help bolster faith in the aviation security.

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  • Premier League-standard football pitch
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ICC Awards for 2021

MEN

Cricketer of the Year – Shaheen Afridi (Pakistan)

T20 Cricketer of the Year – Mohammad Rizwan (Pakistan)

ODI Cricketer of the Year – Babar Azam (Pakistan)

Test Cricketer of the Year – Joe Root (England)

WOMEN

Cricketer of the Year – Smriti Mandhana (India)

ODI Cricketer of the Year – Lizelle Lee (South Africa)

T20 Cricketer of the Year – Tammy Beaumont (England)

Sole survivors
  • Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
  • George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
  • Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
  • Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
Best Foreign Language Film nominees

Capernaum (Lebanon)

Cold War (Poland)

Never Look Away (Germany)

Roma (Mexico)

Shoplifters (Japan)

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