When Pakistan closed its airspace during conflict with India in February, Malaysia Airlines was not one of the carriers left scrambling to re-route flights because it had already done so two weeks earlier, the carrier’s CE said. Nearly five years after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down by a missile over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board, carriers like Malaysia Airlines are increasingly taking steps to uncover any threats to their planes. But concerns persist over inadequate government intelligence sharing and a reluctance by countries involved in conflict to divulge information or sacrifice overflight fees by shutting their skies, safety experts said. “The wound is still here in the whole organization and we take safety very seriously,” Malaysia Airlines CE Izham Ismail said. In the aftermath of the shooting down of MH17, the aviation industry backed the creation by a UN agency of a conflict zone website as a one-stop repository for route planning. But when the site was later closed after complaints from some countries over information-sharing, airlines turned elsewhere for advice. “For the big 50 airlines, they have the resources to dedicate a security department to the job,” said Mark Zee, founder of OPSGROUP, which launched the free website Safe Airspace to provide guidance after MH17. “For everyone else - and that is thousands of operators, I can tell you that many of them have a really hard time making a decent risk assessment. I see it in the emails we get every day.”<br/>
oneworld
American Airlines’ top six executives purchased an extra 85,000 shares, paying a combined $2.37m after the company posted this year’s biggest drop among major US carriers. CEO Doug Parker paid $1.4m for 50,000 shares, while President Robert Isom bought 15,000 at a cost of $416,250, according to regulatory filings Tuesday. The four remaining executives, including CCFO Derek Kerr, took 5,000 each for as much as $138,800. “These share purchases are not part of our compensation package,” the executives said in a message to employees. “They were purchased solely because of the value we see in American today and over time.” The purchases were the first such coordinated action by American’s top executives, said spokesman Matt Miller. Parker chose in 2015 to give up the cash portion of his compensation and be paid only in stock. The shares have dropped 43% since then, and the CEO has repeatedly said American is undervalued. His latest open-market purchase was the biggest for an insider at the carrier in at least 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.<br/>