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Global aviation needs stronger governance

The news that has emerged from the Singapore Airshow Aviation Leadership Summit, organised as part of the biennial Singapore Airshow, seems to paint a rosy picture of the aviation industry.

The lack of information in the MH370 disaster also resulted in the search being wrongly concentrated in the South China Sea for more than a week. China, which had the most number of nationals on board the flight, was most displeased with Malaysia. Photo: Reuters

The lack of information in the MH370 disaster also resulted in the search being wrongly concentrated in the South China Sea for more than a week. China, which had the most number of nationals on board the flight, was most displeased with Malaysia. Photo: Reuters

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The news that has emerged from the Singapore Airshow Aviation Leadership Summit, organised as part of the biennial Singapore Airshow, seems to paint a rosy picture of the aviation industry.

Singapore’s Coordinating Minister for Infrastructure and Minister for Transport, Mr Khaw Boon Wan, highlighted that the longer-term outlook for aviation is “actually very good”.

Mr Tony Tyler, director-general and chief executive of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), called 2015 an “extraordinarily safe year” for aviation, with only 68 accidents, compared with 77 in 2014 and an annual average of 90 over the last five years.

In terms of fatalities, there were 136 last year compared with 641 in 2014 and “a five-year average of 504”. But the figure excluded the Germanwings and Metrojet incidents on March 24 and October 31 2015, respectively, which, if included, would increase the number to 510.

But aviation incidents in Asia have dominated the headlines in recent years.

In 2014, Malaysian Airlines’ MH370 went missing in March, MH17 crashed over Ukraine in July, along with TransAsia Airways GE222 in Taiwan that same month. Then in December, AirAsia QZ8501 plunged into the Java Sea.

In 2015, TransAsia Airways GE235 went down in Taiwan in February, and Trigana Air Service Flight 257 crashed in Indonesia in August.

What these aviation incidents have highlighted is the apparent lack of governance in aviation recovery. So while prospects for the industry may be taking off, as indicated by industry leaders, what is weighing the industry down is the lack of a proper global framework on crisis management.

We are looking at the interconnectedness of airline safety records, the management of public expectations, attentiveness to the psychological fallout from safety lapses, and the quality of international search and rescue efforts.

All the above cast aspersions on the state of relations among governments, their citizens, their military and civil defence forces, and airline companies.

AIR DISASTERS’ PROBLEMS

Such relations and governance ought to have been established in the 1920s and 1930s, at the take-off of the earliest conventions governing civilian air travel, but World War II and the onset of the Cold War among the great powers stymied such developments.

When “glaring” incidents hit close to home, such as MH370 and MH17, people started asking questions about the place of aviation governance in traditional diplomacy, and how regional governments intervene in cases like these.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) does not make “binding” rules under all circumstances. Take, for instance, the MH17 case, where the commercial flight with nearly 300 passengers and crew was allegedly shot down by a missile over eastern Ukraine: The ICAO merely issued advisories about Ukrainian airspace but did not have the authority to ban airlines and governments from staging civilian flights through Ukraine.

It is also known that if airliners go down in common seas and oceans, the International Maritime Organization is the reference point for guidelines for recovery efforts.

Unsurprisingly, given conflicting jurisdictions, search and rescue is largely subject to the decision and authority of the state within its sovereign area of responsibility, and it is up to the state to coordinate any search and rescue efforts.

However, in an aviation disaster, given the international nature of a flight, responsibilities turn murky, and are sometimes even contested: Who owns the aircraft, who operates the aircraft, who owns the technology, who can best interpret the information relating to the aircraft loss, where it crashed, which state’s airspace the aircraft traversed on its journey, from which state the passengers hail, and even what capabilities the various parties — who have a stake in the aircraft crash — can bring to bear on the search, including the capabilities of the state where the aircraft crashed. These can be issues that are internationalised, politicised, and even become a matter of security competition and not just cooperation.

For instance, in the MH370 crash, the ad hoc nature of the search and rescue operation was evident, coupled with the lack of clarity from Malaysia, to the extent that misleading information was often fed to the global media.

The lack of information also resulted in the search being wrongly concentrated in the South China Sea for more than a week.

China, which had the highest number of nationals on the flight, was most displeased with Malaysia, sending its own ships to take part in the search operations, and even dialling down its “panda diplomacy” when it postponed plans to send a pair of pandas to Malaysia, as bilateral relations remained uneasy over MH370’s disappearance.

Vietnam and Malaysia traded blame over who was most responsible for the delay in activating the search and rescue operations. It fell to the British satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat to use cutting-edge methods to narrow the search area, thereby focusing the multinational search.

Australia eventually took charge of the search once it moved towards the southern Indian Ocean, a role it is still assuming today, almost two years since the flight’s disappearance. When a piece of wing debris was found on Reunion Island in July 2015, Malaysia jumped the gun, announcing that the flaperon was part of MH370 even before the official examination led by the French was completed.

Air disasters make for a strangely riveting and attention-grabbing spectacle on television and social media, be it Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. They have a way of conveying profound grief in byte-sized capsules, leaving out a forest of subtle details yet to be analysed by experts.

These immediately put the governments involved — be it the state where the airline is based, or the state with the highest number of affected passengers — under pressure to restore pre-disaster normalcy, while being heavily scrutinised.

Yet in times of aviation disasters, saving lives must be the overriding priority, and “saving face” (or reputation) must come second. Governments and professional aviation bodies need to overcome the obstacles posed by sovereignty and national pride in order to act swiftly and humanely.

Three steps in fostering aviation governance in the area of safety and recovery come to mind. First, sharing information in a transparent and timely manner in order to effect a quick response. Second, demonstrate capable leadership, with government and military leaders taking charge and coordinating the relief effort. Third, drawing up and putting in place disaster relief protocols for an efficient operation.

Simulated exercises on aircraft search and recovery also ought to be a practical way forward to pull together the various national and global professional bodies for such operations. Any number of regional bodies from the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), to the East Asia Summit may initiate these practical steps.

Certainly we should take the cue from Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who is also Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies. At the opening dinner of the Singapore Airshow Aviation Leadership Summit, he reminded his audience: “Aviation safety must continue to take top priority in both domestic and international policymaking, and we should certainly not let politics lead us to decisions that compromise safety.”

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