COMMENT In the aftermath of MH370, there has also been the question of scrambling fighter jets, once military assets failed to identify the object they picked up north of Penang.

I do not think it is reasonable for our first reaction to be to shoot out of the sky anything we do not recognise or expect, nor do I think excessive paranoia regarding some form of massive invasion is warranted.

Surely however, in cases like this, we would do well to err on the side of caution? Much has been written about how Malaysian military spending is basically first and foremost a commission-generating activity for middlemen which results in substandard equipment which we are poorly trained to use.

The fact that jets were not scrambled does not prove this fact, but, at the very least, an opportunity to demonstrate the combat readiness of our air force was missed.

Would scrambling such jets have saved MH370? It is impossible to tell for sure. There is every possibility that even if the jets were launched and managed to make visual contact with MH370 that the plane might have crashed nevertheless.

That said, at the very least we would have known how, why, where and under what circumstances. This would have provided closure to the victim’s families, and made a defining difference in search and rescue efforts.

A good example that is relevant is the case of Helios Airways Flight 522, which crashed in 2005. In this case, depressurisation incapacitated the crew of the flight, which entered a holding pattern above Athens airport under autopilot. Two F-16 jets from the Hellenic Air Force were scrambled, and were able to make visual contact, confirming that the pilot was missing, the co-pilot slumped over motionless, and that oxygen masks had been deployed.

Surely given the overall risk analysis, it is worth deploying military assets to identify unidentified flying objects, whatever the scenario. Instead, what excuses are we given?

Reuters reports: “When we were alerted, we got our boys to check the military radar. We noticed that there was an unmarked plane flying back but (we) could not confirm (its identity),” said the senior military source. “Based on the information we had from ATC (Air Traffic Control) and DCA (Department of Civil Aviation), we did not send up any jets because it was possibly mechanical problems and the plane might have been going back to Penang.”

The words burn hard - ‘could not confirm’, ‘possibly’, ‘might have been’. The military did not know - whether it was because they were not told or they did not trouble themselves sufficiently to find out is secondary. Whichever the case, neither the military or civil authorities seemed to be aware of critical information the other possessed in those early hours - information that could have made all the difference.

Slow mobilisation

On that fateful Saturday, another question that comes to mind is the question of the timeliness of mobilisation.

If this timeline from The Star is accurate, the first news of ships being mobilised to search for the aircraft appear to have been from China, at around 1pm that Saturday.

A little while later, Hishammuddin Hussein reports that Malaysian naval vessels in the area have been deployed.

Based on information available at the time, the plane could have gone down as many as 11 or 12 hours prior to these deployments - this being before taking into account the amount of time the vessels will take to reach said area.

Again, if the plane had gone down in the water, a very real possibility at the time, the timeliness with which the crash site was reached by rescue vessels was literally a matter of life and death. Why did we take so long?

Fatal information-sharing deficits

Then comes the often debated matter of information sharing. According to the same The Star timeline, it is only the next day, on Sunday around 3.30pm (some 38 hours after last contact with MH370) that the air force reveals the fact that their radar picked up what was most likely MH370 north of Penang.

So, not only were we late in launching rescue vessels, but both our vessels and the vessels of other countries were presumably looking in the wrong seas.

While this bureaucratic nightmare of games and shadows was being played out, for all we knew at the time, a mother and child could be slipping from life, barely afloat in the Andaman sea.

It is not as if this data only came to the air force’s attention on Sunday at 3pm. Someone made a conscious decision not to reveal readily available information for some 36 hours, putting lives at risk, and making any hope of rescue dimmer by the minute.

This was only the beginning an appalling lack of transparency, amounting to playing with people’s lives.

Overseas observers rightly noted that given Malaysia’s appalling record with freedom of the press and the gross dearth of accountability that follows, the high standards to which the rest of the world holds those in power came as a rude shock to the Malaysian government.

The many times various authorities contradicted one another displayed confusion and incompetence that might have almost been farcical, if not for the lives at stake.

Over the days and weeks that followed, Malaysia’s refusal to share information and lead responsibly with regards to search and rescue efforts became a source of significant frustration from other governments and citizens.

Many countries were too polite to protest too outwardly amidst all the grief, but the US, China and Vietnam all quietly made known their frustrations with the roadblocks that they met at so many turns, for what seemed like no discernible good reason.

The people who run Malaysia displayed once again how they are so used to crawling around in dark shadows, prioritising safeguarding their own hides over safeguarding the lives and welfare of others - habits even a disaster of this magnitude failed to dislodge.

Lessons learnt?

We struggle in our ignorance as to the fate of MH370. It is not likely we can do much more to change their fates.

We can however, do our best to ensure it never happens again. Too often, the hype dies down, and those who profit from our poor, defunct systems continue business as usual.

After the Genting bus crash of August 2013 for instance, can we be sure that any serious steps have been taken to prevent the same? It would seem unlikely, given the way we still see buses drive today.

When reading about the MV Sewol, I looked up as well the maritime tradition that a captain should go down with his ship. Many captains throughout history have given their lives in accordance with this tradition of taking ultimate responsibility.

It is less important whether those responsible keep or lose their jobs. It is imperative however, that they take responsibility, explain what happened, and show us how things will improve.

If we were to avoid imposing the same pain and suffering of another 200 families in the future, then we need to know what went wrong at every single juncture, and what we can do to fix it. No more lies, no more cover ups.

Yesterday Part I: S Korean PM resigns, no heads roll after MH370


NATHANIEL TAN tweets @NatAsasi. This is the second of a two-part article.