13 January 2020
Now that Iran has accepted responsibility for downing an Ukrainian passenger jet within minutes of its take off from Teheran, the international aviation community needs to revisit the tenets of how it reacts to volatile situations and prevents incidents of the nature that occurred in Teheran and the downing of a Air Malaysia flight over Ukraine itself a couple of years back.
Of course, as a writer, I want to say, it all started when the US downed an Iranian passenger jet in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War and how the world reacted, particularly the international civil aviation organisation (ICAO) that charters all these global and country specific civil aviation sector. One area where the UN failed to, was getting its own Civil Aviation Transport Safety Board which would investigate all cases of air crash across the globe, because flight safety, in any case involved USA or EU being the only two common manufacturers of aircraft in this passenger class, and while UN is not a body that has been successful in preventing unilateralism by any of the Permanent members of the Security Council, but it does have much better ascendency than an individual country’s transport safety board and is not expected to be compromised by vested interests of the parent country which creates persistent doubts like the MH 370, the Air Malaysia flight whose fate remains a mystery to this day!
Initial reaction of the watchers online to the Ukrainian crash was that it was a Boeing 737, so there was quite a scramble to rule out on chatter windows of the web, if this was a 737 Max. The reason is that now common consensus of experts is that Boeing was not really forthcoming about the technology onboard and the glitches of software that caused the two crashes: Lion Air and Air Kenya of this category of aircraft which has now been established clearly as due to failure of aircraft’s on board computer assisted avionics that overwhelmed the pilots in the cockpit and crashed these planes. It was also clear that after the Lion Air crash itself, Boeing was aware of the root cause, it offered upgrades and patchwork to fix it, and the Kenyan Max was one such ‘rectified’ which again went down. Now today, only US based 737 Max are flying, the fleet has been grounded everywhere else.(https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/22/18275736/boeing-737-max-plane-crashes-grounded-problems-info-details-explained-reasons)
Now coming to military Anti Aircraft missile batteries which brought down civilian aircraft, the same could be easily averted if all signatories to the Geneva Convention and UN Charter were to adopt a software code that made their missile systems and radars recognise civilian aircraft and not lock on them unless there was a tiered higher level of command for the override of such soft ware based safety feature. The reason why there should be an override feature is because of 9/11, when we know that terrorists took over the aircraft, rammed them into the WTC Twin Towers, to the Pentagon and created the new phase of ‘Clash of Civilisations’ providing the US government and the rest of the world with a legitimate ground for subsequent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. In fact, there is already a system on board civilian aircraft where if the cockpit sanctity is breached, the aircraft transponder can send signals to nearest ATCs world wide. Now a software workaround can be made, which will allow aircraft with breached cockpits to get painted by SAM Batteries and taken out if the military contingency so demands.
ICAO also failed in assessing the scenario in Ukraine and now in Iran, and operating airlines had options which they could not exercise because of lack of such assessments. After Suleimani drone strike, when the whole world was agog with sand modelling over how World War III would unfold(Indian News Channels were particularly going the whole hog with assured armageddon), and Iranian retaliation was afoot, did ICAO issue a warning to civil aviation to avoid over fly, to reschedule their Iran based operations? Certainly in Ukraine mid air shooting down of the Air Malaysia plane, the direction to avoid Ukrainian airspace came after the tragedy. Even if ICAO had directed International Terminal at Teheran to step up to the possibility of missile strikes on civilian aircraft, the possibility of a better warning, of sounding an alarm to nearby military forces deployed about an aircraft taking off as a cleared civilian flight could have averted this shooting down. Unlike the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 on 3rd July 1988(https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655) where the protagonist nation- USA, staged an elaborate coverup and never accepted gross mistakes in rules of its own Naval Engagement in International Waters, and honoured the Captain of USS Vincennes instead of court marshalling him, Iran is expected to take corrective steps because she has already apologised and admitted to the accidental shooting down of the Ukrainian aircraft PS 752. (https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/08/middleeast/plane-crash-victims-iran-intl/index.html) In the case of the Air Malaysia MH17 flight shot down over Donetsk, the Dutch are preparing to persecute the protagonists, who are members of a Ukrainian militia backed by Russian FSB who fired a missile to bring down the aircraft on 17 July 2014. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48691488)
But just step back and think, if ICAO had banned flights in and out of Iran for 48 hours after Suleimani’s killing? Reviewed the situation, and slowly restored civil aviation in the region, including overflights as part of a planned escalation to contingency, then would not PS752 have been grounded? There is no guarantee that we will not have flash points in the future, but when it comes to say natural events, like an volcanic eruption, or the new bushfires weather system in Australia, ICAO is able to step in, ban overflight and take off and landing in affected zones.(https://news.sky.com/story/philippines-volcano-eruption-flights-cancelled-amid-mass-evacuations-11906956) So in all fairness, the ICAO administration as a specialised UN agency needs review, and it can get the assistance of strategic experts to come to an internationally clear ‘Go/No Go’ for military conflicted areas and flash points to ensure that we do not have such carnage midair that we saw MH 17/MAS 17 over Donetsk in Ukraine and PS752 in Teheran in Iran! Air Travellers surely won’t mind being grounded if there is a possibility of being shot down midair! The loss of so many promising lives of Iranian, Canadian, Afghan, British, Swedish, German besides the Ukrainian crew on board was eminently preventable. It will weigh hopefully on the collective conscience of the international civil aviation community this time and we will have corrective action at hand!
indiarubberman.com 