Episode 16 - The mystery of MH370 & Malaysia’s hapless response

Plane Crash Diaries

This episode is fraught because we just don’t know what happened to Malaysian Flight MH370 and many pilots would say any sort of scientific conclusion is going to be a jump to a conclusion. However, I am going to take you through this event again and describe what the likely scenario was on that terrible morning back in 2014. Part of what we do as aviators is to know the truth about risk, then act accordingly. In this case, we have some truths and then, we have deception. Unfortunately I am going to explain how the deception involved aviation officials in Malaysia who treated both the Chinese and their own citizens shoddily after flight MH370 disappeared. This compounded an already difficult situation. As I have previously outlined, Malaysia’s aviation sector is a seething mass of government interference, full of patriarchs who appear to worry more about losing face than losing passengers. Malaysia suffers from what we call cadre deployment, those ruling party-linked relatives of someone in power who is dropped into a scientific endeavour with not the first clue about how aeroplanes work, nor how they should apply themselves within the sector. Then when things go wrong they think shutting down the truth makes sense – which is the direct opposite of how to fix a broken system. This is not aimed at citizens of the beautiful country of Malaysia, rather its aimed directly at ramshackle nature of how aviation has been managed in the country. I will show you how in the case of MH370 a distinct lack of understanding about crucial issues like prompt action, search and rescue, technical descriptions about how aeroplanes work, was worsened by a fraternity of yes-men who basically preferred deliberate obfuscation when they were confronted by bereaved relatives .