When all the dust has settled on this tragic mystery and the recriminations and allocation of blame begins, one of the principal criticisms of Malaysian Airlines and the Malaysian Government aircraft safety authorities will be their failure to follow even the basic steps of ICAO Annex 12 – Search and Rescue*. (I assume Malaysia is a Contracting State to the ICAO).
Annex 12 has been around since 1951 and basically lays out three basic steps or actions to be taken when an aircraft goes missing. The ‘Uncertainty Phase’ begins 30 mins. after an aircraft goes off radar or fails to respond to radio calls. This initial phase should act as a wake up call to the closest S & R services and also get everyone prepared in case there is a need to move to the next phase – the Alert Phase. This second phase is less clearly defined, but is certainly not meant to be the point where the aircraft must have run out of fuel. Finally, the third phase, ‘Distress’, is when the aircraft is obviously no longer airborne – i.e. crashed/run out of fuel.
It is debatable which phase is the most critical of the three. In the case of MH370, and with lots of 20/20 hindsight, the lack of real action in the ‘Uncertainty Phase’ will undoubtedly be the focus of Malaysian authority criticism. Again, and with 20/20 hindsight, a coordinator should have been appointed in the first hour of contact being lost with the first step of the coordinator being to contact neighboring countries to backtrack over their radar recordings to search for the B777. It appears the authorities did nothing until the situation was well into the third, ‘Distress’ phase. Coordination with the ACARS/INMARSAT folk during this first phase would most likely have revealed a SW heading of the B777 well before it ran out of fuel, possibly resulting in a search being initiated off Perth on Day 1 instead of Day 12.
Finally, I find it odd that aircraft routinely flying over the Poles and vast uninhabited areas such as Siberia for years have been under a mandatory requirement to be equipped with ELTs or tracking device while aircraft flying the vast trans oceanic routes are not. Lets hope this tragedy, if nothing else, will change that situation and also encourage Government and Airline safety organizations to read and adhere to ICAO Annex 12.
*
http://www.unlb.org/showbinarydata.a...%12%92r%E2W%DE