The Other MH370 Mystery: Why a Key Safety Measure Keeps Stalling

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Malaysia Airlines Flight three seventy disappeared seemingly out of thin air ten years ago. Aviation officials lost contact with the flight less than an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur. It is aviation's biggest mystery. The search continued so far forty eight hours on no sign of the plane, no debris. It's been really puzzling for the for the

Up, confirming that the plane part found on the island of Reunion did indeed come from MH three to seventy, That missing plane that authorities have been searching for for a year now.

It was a shocking event that sent ripples through the airline industry and around the world. Aviation authorities and manufactures alike were adamant that changes were necessary to ensure that it wouldn't happen again. They even had some potential solutions. But it's ten years later and one of those key changes hasn't been implemented, meaning the prospect of another MH three to seventy style mystery still looms on the horizon.

It looked like just a normal flight, and investigators have looked at the recordings, the audio transmissions, everything seemed normal.

Ingerswitolee reports on the aviation industry for Bloomberg.

And then within an hour there was a final recorded transmission from the cockpit, good night Malaysian three seven zero, and that was the last transmitted words from the cockpit.

Minutes after that transmission, the plane disappeared off of air traffic control radars, and the big question was what happened to it?

This is the question, my goodness.

It's known as aviation's greatest mystery and we don't really know what happened to this plane, and ten years on, we still don't really know that. The so much research, so much science has gone into this missing plane, and I think it's for that reason it's really weighed on people's minds.

The story was featured on nightly news broadcasts for months, but even as search and rescue efforts through in size and scope, there was nothing. Thousands of men and women scaring millions of square miles looking for a needle in a haystack.

Twenty nine aircraft, fourteen ships.

Still nothing. Looks now we're back to square one.

It's kind of crazy that something like this happened today. I can find my smartphone almost instantly. How can it be that MH three seventy, which is a Boeing seven seven seven as long as a Manhattan City block, go missing so completely?

Yeah, And I.

Think this is why the industry was struck into action at the time.

In most situations, when airplanes are traveling above land, air traffic controllers can track them pretty efficiently. Satellite communication systems can also beam out aircraft positions.

Usually, aircraft are just handed off from air traffic control screen to air traffic control authority to the next one, or if it's a domestic flight, they'll be on the screens of air traffic or pretty much the whole way. So it is possible for airlines and authorities to pretty much know where every plane is. So that means in theory, you should not get a plane fall out.

The sky and go missing forever.

It's so it comes down to the idea of it, can you lose a plane if there's some sort of foul play.

Investigators suspected that there could have been foul play involved in the case of the Malaysian plane, that perhaps the communication system was intentionally switched off. They couldn't say for sure, but it was this speculation and the urgency of the plane going missing that fueled calls for better systems, systems that could prevent a plane from going dark in any circumstance, and.

So there was a movement to see how the industry can better track its aircraft and also how they can make these tracking systems more resilient. One of the things that was proposed and decided on after M three seven went missing was that there must be a system in

It must be a way of.

Beaming that position to authorities and search and rescue authorities so they have a better idea of where it is.

Malaysian authorities and global regulators proposed a new standard. A specific range of scenarios would activate a tracking device that would broadcast a plane's position at least once every minute.

And the idea of that is, if it goes down, we'll have a pretty good idea of where it's gone down in a remote part of the earth.

And to a lot of officials, this seem like a great idea makes sense right in an emergency, have planes automatically put out their location minute by minute, even if systems shut down or power goes out. But the deadline set by officials for the aviation industry to impleat that backup has long passed and most planes still don't have them. Why not when we come back? How bureaucracy and financial

So this happened in sequences and I guess so sort of if I've been looking at old the regulatory amendments since twenty fourteen and MHTRE seventy went missing.

And the first.

Deadline for the implementation of one minute tracking as it became known, was in January first, twenty twenty one, and it was at that point where a rule was meant to come into force where large passenger planes would have to beam their positions at least once a minute when they were in trouble, and that was in January twenty twenty one. Now as it got closer to that deadline,

The up to twenty twenty three, the COVID pandemic upended commercial air travel.

And that was an enormous blow.

And so not only did that leave sort of air travel essentially crippled and fleets granded, but it also saw brand new planes that weren't equipped with this tracking device sent into the desert put in storage. So it really made it very difficult to hit that twenty twenty three standard. Not least, there were huge financial pressure on the aviation

I mean, you mentioned COVID as one reason for the hold up, but besides that was stopping the aviation industry from adopting these tracking measures. Based on what your sources have told you, aviation is.

A very slow moving beast, and they operate under a set of global standards.

What people tell me is there may be some.

Countries that are perfectly able to implement a standard at a certain time, but they operate under the lowest common denominator. So it's a global industry and they have a set of global operating standards. I think it has to be said that ematurally seventy was an extremely rare event, and it's the only one of its kind I can remember

Has worn off.

And if you look at the regulator amendments sort of chronicling these delays that I've talked about, some of them mentioned that the cost benefits of delaying the implementation of this standard, that the industry saved several hundred million dollars in delaying this.

These proposed requirements will only apply to new planes when they come into effect by that delayed deadline. Twenty twenty five, Bloomberg News reached out to more than a dozen major airlines and asked how many planes of theirs met the requirements already. Of the airlines that applied, very few planes were compliant.

We were told by two or three that they had a handful, no more than seven. In one case of Air France told this they had seven jets that were compliant with the standard. In air France had more than two hundred and fifty planes in operation last year. Korean Airlines so it had three planes compliant with the standard, and Korean air has more than one hundred and fifty planes in its fleet, so the indications are that the standard is really in very few planes in the air

So there's a.

Huge, big hole in the kind of tracking ability of the global commercial fleet, and those planes are going to be flying for decades without this tracking device because there's no requirement to retrofit this tracking device. The lack of answers is still weighing on people ten years on, not least the families. I mean, this is a human tragedy and hundreds of families.

Are still left with no answers.

But when I speak to people involved at the time who were searching for the plane now, it still weighs on.

Some of them even now.

And I spoke to an Australian's air safety investigator you join the international team investigators up in Kuala Lumpur, and he told me he still thinks about MH three seventy every day.

This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Alex Suguiera. It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Katrina Nicholas. It was fact checked by Tiffany Choi. It was mixed by Alex Zuguiera. Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and Jill Duddy Carly. We get editorial direction from Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole beamsterbor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening, Please follow and review The Big Take wherever