Malaysia Airlines is out of intensive care. Now it's working on long-term rehabilitation. Two years ago this week, disaster struck when Flight 370 vanished, leaving the company reeling from a crisis magnified months later by the downing of a second Boeing 777 over Ukraine. Shunned by travellers and already ailing from years of mismanagement that saddled it with at least $1.7b in losses since 2011, the Southeast Asian airline teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, forcing its government owners to carry out radical restructuring. New CEO Christoph Mueller, a turnaround veteran, has been scaling back or cutting unprofitable routes, grounding jets and axing 6,000 workers from a bloated workforce as part of a $1.7 billion overhaul aimed at returning the carrier to profitability as early as next year. Analysts say, however, the strategy of shrinking to survive makes Malaysia vulnerable to fierce competition from the budget carriers proliferating to serve Asia's booming, travel-hungry middle class consumers. Competitors include homegrown rival Malaysia AirAsia as well as Indonesia's Lion Air, Singapore's Tigerair and Scoot and Qantas offshoot Jetstar. Mueller made his biggest move yet in December, unveiling a strategic alliance with Emirates that allows Malaysia Airlines to piggyback onto more than 90 of the Gulf carrier's global routes as it shrinks its own network to focus on Asia. The deal with Emirates was "definitely a rabbit out of the hat," said Mohshin Aziz, an aviation analyst at Maybank Kim Eng Securities. "Yet they made it happen. For me, that's definitely a solid foundation for their future survival." Still, the unsolved mystery of MH370 haunts the airline.<br/>
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The relatives of a dozen Chinese passengers aboard missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 began filing suits against the company at a Beijing court Monday, just a day before a legal deadline to do so. Packed into a small office at the Beijing Rail Transportation Court, which has been designated to handle MH370 cases, they held manilla folders with litigation papers in their hands. Several wiped away quiet tears, turning to borrow tissues from neighbours, before depositing their documents with court officials. The flight, with 239 people -- including 153 Chinese citizens -- on board, vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, and authorities said it went down in the southern Indian Ocean. Under international agreements, families have two years to sue over air accidents. But many Chinese families still believe their relatives are alive and were "deeply conflicted" over the decision to go to court, said lawyer Zhang Qihuai, whose Lanpeng firm represents the group who were filing suit on Monday. "They think that after you've accepted compensation, the company can deny any further responsibility and wash its hands of the incident, and that the public will naturally forget about the whole thing," he explained. <br/>
A resident on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion who last year found a wing fragment from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 said on Sunday he had come across a second possible piece from the missing plane. Johnny Begue, who found the "flaperon" part while cleaning a beach last July, said he handed over the new suspected object to police immediately after finding it last Thursday. He said he was out jogging by the sea shore when he found the object measuring about 40 by 20 centimetres, which had a blue mark on the surface and was grey underneath. Begue said it was of the same lightweight "honeycomb" construction as the flaperon piece. The flaperon he found remains the only piece of debris identified with certainty as having come from the flight. Begue said he has been combing the island's shores ever since. "When there's bad weather is when you should look, when the sea tosses up a lot of stuff," he said. Police have not contacted Begue since he handed over the new object on Thursday, he said. Begue's reported find came three days after an American amateur investigator found suspected MH370 debris in Mozambique, some 2,100 kilometres west of Reunion. That object, which is about a metre long, has been sent to Australia for expert analysis.<br/>
Modern aviation may be the safest complex system ever devised. Each day, 100,000 flights take off and land with prosaic regularity. Accidents are so rare that, almost by definition, they mean something unprecedented has happened. The unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 -- which occurred almost two years ago, presumably killing all 239 people aboard -- is by any definition unprecedented. And despite some tantalizing hints, its fate remains utterly mysterious. As such, it makes a poor basis for dramatic changes in public policy. Modern planes are so safe that adding yet more rules and requirements in response to an incomprehensible tragedy could very well make things worse. Consider proposals to mandate tamper-proof transponders. That sounds prudent: Someone aboard Flight 370 evidently switched off its communications systems, taking it off the grid. But pilots may have perfectly valid reasons for turning a transponder off, such as recovering from a malfunction or preventing overheating. Likewise, the United Nations wants to track aircraft more frequently and in greater detail. Again, this sounds like a no-brainer. Yet planes are already thoroughly tracked. It may be that the safest thing to do in response to Malaysia Flight 370 is something that almost defies human intuition: nothing at all.<br/>
The search for the Malaysia Airlines jet that vanished almost two years ago has involved ships scanning thousands of square miles of the Indian Ocean seabed. But what could be the most promising development in months was the result of a lone man’s search, one that took him to an uninhabited sandbank along the coast of Mozambique. Blaine Alan Gibson’s discovery of a triangular piece of fiberglass composite and aluminum, if it is confirmed to be from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, could add to the scant concrete evidence of what happened to the Boeing 777. Like much of the world, Gibson, a lawyer from Seattle, said he had become intrigued by the fate of the plane while watching the intensive news coverage after its disappearance. He attended events in Kuala Lumpur marking the first anniversary of the flight, and after meeting with families of missing passengers, he decided to pursue his own investigation. “I had some spare time and spare money, so I decided to travel to a few places to get an idea of what may have happened,” he said. The quest has taken him to Myanmar, to look for debris in the Andaman Sea and examine local radar capabilities. He went to the Maldives to speak with people who claimed to have seen a low-flying plane on the day of the flight. He visited the French island of Réunion, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, where the only confirmed debris from the plane to date, a part of an airplane wing called a flaperon, was found in July. On the morning of Feb. 27, he sailed with Suleman Valy, who is known as Junior and runs a local beach hotel and guide service, and a boat captain to a sandbar called Paluma. “We landed on an island with, like, no vegetation and walked around, up and down,” Mr. Gibson said. “Most of the stuff there was just regular beach junk that I always see — plastic bottles, sandals, cigarette lighters. Suddenly Junior calls out.” The piece they discovered, about a metre long, is fiberglass composite with honeycombed aluminum inside. Investigators said that it could be from the horizontal stabilizer on the tail of the plane. Officials in Australia, which has been coordinating the Indian Ocean search, said it would be sent there for testing. Like the officials, Gibson expressed caution about concluding that the object he found is from Flight 370. The sooner “it gets to Australia and they determine it’s one thing or another, the better,” he said.<br/>
American Airlines Group Inc.’s pilots union, an early backer of the carrier’s merger with US Airways, blasted the return of “toxic” labour relations, a substandard product and violations of their contract. American executives can no longer rely on the excuse that they need more time to bring everything into order since the two companies merged in December 2013, the Allied Pilots Association board of directors said in a March 4 letter to CEO Doug Parker. Many of the airline’s middle managers are “misaligned” with Parker’s call at a recent leadership conference for better labor relations that will bring all employees in line with a push to make American the best airline, the letter said. The missive may herald the first schism between the merged American and its unions, which broke with previous management during the airline’s bankruptcy to support then-US Airways CEO Parker in his bid to combine the carriers. The bankrupt American was known for poor labour relations that kept the pilots and management from reaching a new contract in 10 years of talks.<br/>
Both American Airlines and Alaska Airlines have filed applications with the US DoT seeking approval to fly direct routes from Los Angeles International Airport to Havana, Cuba. American Airlines said it submitted an application to fly 10 daily flights from its Latin America gateway hub in Miami to Havana and one daily flight from Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth and Charlotte, N.C. The carrier also wants to fly daily routes between Miami and five other Cuban cities: Santa Clara, Hoguin, Vardero, Camaguey and Cienfuegos. Meanwhile, Alaska Airlines said it is seeking to fly two daily nonstop flights from its Latin America gateway of Los Angeles to Havana, adding that the LA metro area has the largest Cuban-American population in the Western United States. The DOT is expected to award the available route authorities before the end of summer. <br/>