The 10th anniversary of the Malaysian MH370’s disappearance fell a few weeks back. This is aviation’s biggest mystery and reams have been written about it.
But what has not been explored is the cultural context within which the bizzaire events took place.
No military jets were scrambled even though there was a wayward aircraft that had so obviously deviated from its flight path. The excuse was that various militaries in the South East Asian region were aware that there was a civilian aircraft that cannot be accounted for on their radars, but decided the airline was innocuous and was returning to another country after having momentarily lost its way.
The problem seemed to be that these militaries had a different culture to their own militaries, say western experts. They say that after 9/11 no military of a western country would have allowed a rogue civilian aircraft to appear on their radars and not scramble jets to challenge it.
The western experts trying to find answers to what happened to MH 370 seem determined to say that the lax response exposed a cultural deficiency. This was Malaysia, they infer, but they in their own countries would have done differently.
There are cultural differences when it comes to matters of running airlines. Asian — especially South Asian — airline corporations did not have a good record of safety and reliability once upon a time, even though as far as Sri Lanka is concerned the two national airlines that ever existed, Air Ceylon, and SriLankan Airlines (formerly known as Air Lanka) have a perfect safety record thus far.
But, despite the notoriety of South Asian flag carriers, today there are airlines that are the envy of the world that are headquartered in the South Asian subcontinent. The private budget airlines run by Indian companies have been excellent.
DEVIATION
They have excelled at managing their budget brands. The safety record has been great too by and large. But yet Asians get a bad rap when something unfortunate happens as it did with the Malaysian airlines MH 370.
However, let us consider the claims seriously. Did the Malaysian government have a stake in concealing the facts, or at least not pursuing the truth assiduously after MH 370 disappeared?
This seems to be a stretch. The Malaysians were up against the same stubborn facts that faced everybody else including the amateur sleuths who wanted to find answers in the case of the mysterious disappearance of a massive aircraft that would ordinarily be difficult to hide anywhere in the world.
Nobody knew the reasons for the flight’s deviation from it’s normal flight path. But there were some clues that the pilot of the aircraft Zaharie Ahmad Shah had led the plane on a suicide mission,which was partly a dare made from the beyond to “find me if you can.”
The facts released after the preliminary investigation into the MH 370 disappearance indicate that the supplementary reserve that keeps the captain supplied with a much greater supply of oxygen than the passengers and crew, was replenished on the day preceding the evening MH 370 got lost.
The Malaysians have still not been able to conclusively determine who gave the orders to top up the Captain’s oxygen supply. Was it the Captain for the scheduled flight Zaharie Ahmad Shah himself, or was it someone else?
This would not be something that’s difficult to determine. There is an engineer who had signed a log that states the relevant oxygen supply was replenished the day before the flight. All that has to be done is to ask him who gave the orders for keeping the captain’s oxygen supply in case of an emergency, at a conveniently optimum level.
Subsequent events seem to suggest that the captain used his oxygen supply for a considerable length of time until he was able to execute a controlled glide of the aircraft so that it would be difficult to find it in the depths of the vast Indian Ocean. At least the crime writers and the investigators have had a field day suggesting that captain Zaharie meticulously executed his plan to incapacitate all passengers and crew by depressurizing the cabin and then flying the aircraft off route for hours in order to bury all traces of it in the forbidding depths of the remote Indian Ocean.
If the Malaysians are unable to determine who topped up the supply of oxygen for the pilot on whose orders, are the westerners right in saying that there was a cultural problem that made the MH 370 disappearance a mystery it should have never been?
LOCATED
As alluded to earlier in this article, some French commentators have said that the Malaysian authorities should have scrambled jets when they realized that the aircraft had deviated course. Asked why he didn’t do it the aviation minister of the Malaysian Government at that time says that this would have been a futile exercise anyway because no military would willfully down a civilian aircraft. “If we did so they would have been the first to say that we did the unthinkable and shot down a civilian passenger airline,” he says, alluding to the fact that he can never win as far as the unrealistic assessments of the western commentators and experts are concerned.
So is the culture argument trumped up? Would the authorities in any western country have done the same with the disappeared aircraft that the Malaysians did?
The Australians have helped with the search and salvage efforts launched after the aircraft disappeared and the experts say that they didn’t search in the exact location the plane could have gone down either. Everybody has a theory, especially when there are no answers and no definitive sign of the wreckage has ever been located.
Does the fact that the search efforts have brawn a blank indicate the Australians are culturally prone to be less than efficient and less than forthcoming when it comes to search and rescue missions? Why is it that only the Malaysians are singled out with the culturally handicapped argument?
It has been a long ten years for the loved ones of those that went missing on March 8, 2014. Modern technology has not been able to determine where the wreckage is, and this is amidst claims that the alleged pieces of wreckage found washed ashore on beaches of remote Indian Ocean islands are not those that belonged to the MH 370 aircraft. At least some relatives of the missing passengers have made this claim, but it is generally supposed that they are making these unfounded allegations because they haven’t properly grieved and are still traumatised by the lack of answers.
Most amateur sleuths and others of a more professional bent, are certain that Zaharie the airline’s captain was the sole individual perpetrator responsible for the aircraft’s mysterious disappearance.
PLAUSIBLE
This seems to be the only reasonable conclusion that can be arrived at considering the facts that have come to light so far. But if it was upto say the French or the Japanese for instance, would they have done differently and made sure that the search continues until some definitive answers are available?
But is there any country that would bankroll an endless fruitless search? That’s what the hunt for MH 370 became in the end. Several countries pooled their resources and scoured the vast seas but nobody could come up with any plausible answers.
Somebody said if it was in Sri Lanka the Minister would have at least publicly engaged a professional clairvoyant. Anyone remembers the Covid decoction (“peniya”) fiasco that was encouraged and cheered on by some state actors at the time the pandemic was raging? Now that certainly seemed to be a “cultural thing” that even the Malaysians would be surprised about.
The Malaysian authorities would never be able to live down the argument that they were culturally prone to conceal and not reveal when it came to MH 370. It probably didn’t help that the government of that time in 2014, was led by a Prime Minister who was jailed later for a colossal corruption scandal named 1MDB.
But now there is a vastly more respectable Malaysian government led by a former jailed martyr Anwar Ibrahim, who led a memorable opposition campaign for justice in Malaysia. The current Premier has only said on the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of MH 370 that if necessary the search for the missing aircraft could begin again. Will he be accused of being culturally prone to make promises that he seems unlikely to convert to action, as far as that ill-fated Malaysian Airlines aircraft MH 370 is concerned?
Rajpal Abeynayake
