Five years after MH17 downing, airline conflict alert system remains patchy

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/>