What Analysts And Experts Have To Say About Malaysia's Management Of The MH370 Crisis

Malaysia, aspiring to become a developed nation in six years, is finding that more than 50 years under one coalition and tight control over information is a mismatch for handling a rapidly growing crisis followed across the world.

Patience appears to be wearing thin in the search for the missing aeroplane, says the BBC's Celia Hatton in Beijing.

bbc.com

China has urged Malaysia to "step up its efforts" in the search for the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane that disappeared on Saturday. "We have a responsibility to demand and urge the Malaysian side to step up search efforts, start an investigation as soon as possible and provide relevant information to China correctly and in a timely manner," he said.

bbc.com

Vietnam said Wednesday it had suspended its air search for missing flight MH370 and scaled back a sea search as it waited for Malaysia to clarify the potential new direction of the multi-national hunt. "We've decided to temporarily suspend some search and rescue activities, pending information from Malaysia," deputy minister of transport Pham Quy Tieu said, adding that boats were still searching the area, but on a smaller scale.

straitstimes.com

"We've asked Malaysian authorities twice, but so far they have not replied to us," Tieu said, when asked about the report. "We informed Malaysia on the day we lost contact with the flight that we noticed the flight turned back west but Malaysia did not respond," he added.

straitstimes.com

Malaysia's air force chief has denied saying military radar had tracked the lost passenger jet turning back and flying to the Strait of Malacca. The pro-government Berita Harian daily had quoted General Tan Sri Rodzali Daud as saying military radar at the Butterworth air force base believed it was tracking the Boeing 777-200ER jet until it disappeared at 2.40am last Saturday.

themalaysianinsider.com

The police chief has also contradicted the earlier statement made by Malaysia’s aviation chief on Monday that five people did not board the plane. In no uncertain terms he said: “There is no such thing as five person who did not board the plane. There is no such thing.”You take it from me, there were no such thing. Nobody booked the ticket that did not board.”

theguardian.com

The Malaysian military has primary radar to provide surveillance of surface and airborne activity off its coasts and borders. It clearly knew more about what happened to MH370 than any other Malaysian agency, but the authorities do not seem to have tapped into this expertise, and the military may have been slow to volunteer it.

flightglobal.com

There are so many information sources that do not appear to have been used effectively in this case. As a result the families of the missing passengers and crew are being kept in the dark, and the search areas now extended to both sides of the peninsula have become so wide that it is clear that tracking information on the aircraft has not been used effectively.

flightglobal.com

Nothing has been said about the 777′s ACARS system (airborne communications addressing and reporting system), a datalink that provides technical information about the health of aircraft systems to Malaysian Airlines’ base. In the 2009 Air France 447 loss case, just before the fatal sequence of events an ACARS transmission told AF’s base that an airspeed sensor disagreement had caused the autopilot to trip out. That information was made public.

flightglobal.com

If MH370 was lost to civil radar screens because the transponder had been switched off, it raises questions as to why that would be so. There has been no report about attempts to pick up signals from the aircraft’s emergency locator transmitter, although the increasingly international fleet of search vessels are clearly doing their best.

flightglobal.com

“They’re handling a huge global issue as if it was domestic politics,” said Clive Kessler, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who has analyzed the nation’s politics for half a century. “With the cause of the disappearance still unknown you can understand the need for discretion and caution but it’s being perceived in Malaysia and elsewhere in the region as a bid to hide the truth.”

Najib’s administration is sending the message that people should let the “government tell them what they need to know, when they need to know it, and not before,” Kessler said. “That’s the way they’ve acted for generations and they are starting to find out it doesn’t work anymore.”

Government-controlled Malaysian Airlines said in a statement yesterday it would “continue to be transparent in communicating with the general public via the media” on all matters affecting Flight 370.

“The Malaysian side cannot shirk its responsibilities,” the Global Times, a Chinese government-controlled newspaper, said in an editorial on March 10. “The initial response from Malaysia was not swift enough. There are loopholes in the work of Malaysia Airlines and security authorities.”

“There are big issues -- transparency, information sharing, questions associated with security,” said Bridget Welsh, a political science professor at Singapore Management University. “They are not in control of the discussion and the problem is they’re not instilling confidence."

Four days after Flight MH370 went missing in mid-air with 239 people on board, no nation has stepped forward to initiate and lead an official probe, leaving a formal leadership vacuum that industry experts say appears unprecedented.

Malaysian officials are conducting their own informal investigations, in cooperation with other governments and foreign agencies, but they lack the legal powers that would come with a formal international probe under U.N.-sanctioned rules. Those powers include the legal rights to take testimony from all witnesses and other parties, the right to have exclusive control over the release of information and the ability to centralise a vast amount of fragmentary evidence.

A senior official familiar with the preliminary Malaysian probe said Malaysian authorities could not yet convene a formal investigation due to a lack of evidence on where - namely, in which national jurisdiction - the Boeing 777-200ER jet crashed.

Without a formal investigative process being convened quickly under rules set out by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a U.N. agency, there is a risk that crucial early detective work could be hampered, and potential clues and records lost, air accident experts said.

Witnesses such as cargo handlers, mechanics and company officials might be reluctant to speak to Malaysian investigators who were operating outside a formal ICAO-sanctioned probe which could offer them some protection from law suits, experts said.

The lack of a formal investigation also means Malaysia does not have exclusive control over the release of information or the ability to centralize fragmentary evidence such as wreckage parts and witness accounts, effectively relying for cooperation on other parties' good-will, the experts said.

Najib’s United Malays National Organisation leads the coalition governing the Southeast Asian nation. Only in recent years has it seen a move toward more competitive elections, in some districts, that put a premium on public speaking. The government’s lack of a clear message, compounded by a series of false leads on the plane’s whereabouts and questions on coordination, risks undermining its image internationally.

Everyone wants to give them the benefit of the doubt but this is a crisis of credibility for the administration.” “It’s a lack of experience, anybody would be tested,” said SMU’s Welsh. “This is Hisham’s test, and Najib’s government’s test.”

businessweek.com

There is an all-pervasive sense of a chaotic lack of coordination between the Malaysian agencies which has hindered the establishment of an effective search strategy.
Meanwhile the failure to provide timely information when simple facts have been established shows a total lack of consideration for the families of those who are missing.

flightglobal.com

Prime Minister Najib Razak lets his cousin, Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, be the face of the investigation into why a Malaysian Airline System Bhd. (MAS) plane vanished on March 8.

It is understandable that Najib doesn’t want a high profile in this situation given his cautious personality, according to Joseph Liow, associate dean of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. Hishammuddin, 52, has been the acting minister since a general election last May. He is unable to formally take the role given internal coalition rules on which party assumes particular posts in cabinet.

“He’s not one who would go to the front of the camera and do lots of chest thumping and wave the flag and all that without being certain that there’s substantive” progress in the investigation, he said. “Hisham is very different from his cousin. He’s someone who is not uncomfortable with the limelight,” he said, referring to Hishammuddin.

Najib needs to assure Malaysians and the international community that his government is doing all it can, said Vishnu Varathan, an economist at Mizuho Bank Ltd. in Singapore.

“What could have been done was the prime minister delegating the transport secretary to locating the plane and assigning one other person in charge of investigating the security breach and another to handle international relations,” he said. “It’s not easy to convey all that is happening in the background and the government needs to highlight these things.”