The political bickering in the aftermath of the Malaysia Airlines tragedy last week has been intense, but very little has been said or done about ways to assess the risks of flying over conflict zones to prevent a similar incident. Rising above the static has been the voice of Tim Clark, the president of Dubai-based Emirates Airline, who has called for new rules to help commercial carriers deal with regional conflict. With the support of competitor Lufthansa, Emirates says the airline industry as a whole must make a statement "that it won't tolerate being targeted in internecine regional conflicts that have nothing to do with airlines".
It’s no secret that the UAE sits in a particularly volatile neighbourhood, making the scheduling of aircraft routes from the ever-expanding hubs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai a difficult business. As well as the civil war in eastern Ukraine, there are open conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Gaza and Libya. Armed groups are operating in Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan and tensions are mounting elsewhere.
Nevertheless, what happened to MH17 was a very rare occurrence. Not every conflict poses a threat to commercial aviation, and few rebel groups are well-enough armed to shoot down an airliner at its cruising altitude. The most recent confirmed incident of a large passenger aircraft being shot down was in 2001, when a Siberian Airlines Tu-154 was accidentally hit over Crimea during a Ukrainian military exercise. The worrying distinction about this latest incident is that it appears to have involved a sophisticated surface-to-air missile that was effective at 33,000 feet – 1,000 feet higher than the minimum level prescribed by air-traffic-control authorities since tensions escalated in eastern Ukraine.
In defending Emirates’ and other carriers’ recent use of the corridor over Donetsk, Mr Clark noted that the airline industry believed that shooting between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russia separatist rebels in the area was at a lower level using only low-grade weapons.
In the light of this, the call for discussions about new protocols should be welcome. While the risk to the millions of people who fly everyday is minimal – and aviation remains safer than any other form of transport – any initiative that can improve overall air safety should be embraced by airlines and international authorities alike.