by Elizabeth Zachariah
The Malaysian Insider
8 March 2015
One year since Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 vanished, the plane’s whereabouts remains a mystery, as does the nagging question – why can’t anyone be held responsible?
Scrutiny of the timeline of events after the Boeing-777 disappeared from radar on March 8, 2014 revealed gaps in communication and a lapse of judgment, in particular by the military, which saw the plane on primary surveillance radar, but did nothing to investigate why it had flown off course.
Malaysian military officials revealed on March 12 that an unidentified aircraft, believed to be MH370, had travelled across the peninsula after doing an air turn-back, and was last sighted on military radar 370km northwest of Penang.
Following this, the search area was then expanded from the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea to include the Strait of Malacca.
It was reported then that senior military officers only became aware of the radar data after news of the aircraft’s disappearance had spread.
Criticism quickly rolled in after this revelation, from opposition politicians, civil society, the Malaysian public and international media.
“Clearly, they had let an unidentified aircraft pass through Malaysian sovereign territory without bothering to identify it; not something they were happy to admit,” aviation consultant David Learmount had said.
“There was clearly a significant failure of response on behalf of the Malaysian air force. There’s no real way around it and you might imagine heads would roll for that,” Bangkok-based analyst for defence-and-security-intelligence firm IHS-Jane, Anthony Davis was quoted as saying in a report by Time.
Veteran DAP leader Lim Kit Siang had also called for “heads to roll”, demanding that an inquiry be launched to seek accountability in the plane’s disappearance and subsequent response.
Renewing his calls for accountability, the Gelang Patah MP said no one has been brought to book for the grave error that could have saved millions of ringgit and given the families of the 239 on board the closure they need.
“This only highlights the need to hold an inquiry through the setting up of a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) to look into the incident,” he added.
Lim said then that one of the areas that should be investigated was whether the disappearance of the jet could have been averted if military radar operators had been more vigilant and had acted promptly. Continue reading “A year on, MH370 still a mystery, errors go unpunished”