Some lessons from the MH370 mystery

TWO acoustic signals detected by Chinese naval ship Haixun 01 and signals picked up by an Australian search ship offer some hope that the MH370 mystery will be solved. Today is exactly one month after the plane went missing. The black box only has power to send signals for about 30 days. Fortunately, the signals detected by Australia's Ocean Shield defence vessel yesterday seems consistent with those emitted by black box flight recorders. Otherwise, the best efforts of debris spotters using an formidable array of assets from United States, China, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Britain and Malaysia scouring an area some 2,000km west of Perth, where it is believed the Boeing 777 with 239 people came down, have found nothing.

However, some lessons from this tragic and troubling event are obvious. The human response to shock and grief varies from culture to culture. When handling distraught relatives and friends, it is important to communicate effectively in a simple, consistent and coherent manner - and in the vernacular. Given that these days people from different countries use each other's airlines, crisis management teams must include people who can speak many languages. It is also important that crisis managers be equipped with the psychological skills to emotionally connect with distraught relatives and friends. Certainly, it serves no good to compare one group's reaction with another in public.

As for aircraft security, some technological advances are already in use in other parts of the world. After the Air France 447 crash in the Atlantic in 2009, the European Union began monitoring flights from takeoff to landing and the system is now common on North Atlantic routes. It is time the regional airlines fell in step. As well, aircraft manufacturers should fit their cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders with batteries that last 90 days, instead of 30 days as the technology is already available. Airlines using aircraft with older recorders must upgrade. And at a time when digital data storage capacity is both cheap and increasing exponentially, it seems strange that cockpit voices are recorded for only up to two hours. Certainly, the next generation of aircraft should have equipment to record conversations for the entire duration of the flight, perhaps even in video. And there must be additional protocols in place before recording equipment can be turned off manually during a flight.