Originally Posted by
jondc9
IanW, interesting that you say by the book.
But nothing about this situation is really by the book, is it?
Sometimes you have to go above and beyond the book.
What controllers do is legally constrained. When a controller hands an aircraft to another agency particularly an agency in another jurisdiction/country there is a legal document called a Memorandum of Understanding that lays down precisely what the controllers each side of the boundary do on transfer of control and what legal responsibilities each controller and service provider have and how they will be enforced. This is why controllers always follow the regulations (the book). Once MH370 had been handed to Ho Chi Minh then Subang had zero responsibility to do anything. But more than that they were required to do NOTHING as it really confuses things if everyone and their dog starts getting involved bending rules because they think that they can help.
Always ONE agency is the one with responsibility and in this case the agency was Ho Chi Minh center. They would have asked Subang - '
Is MH370 still with you - he's not talking to me' (an extremely common occurrence). Subang would have made a call on their frequency to MH370 to see if the aircraft was still on their frequency and if no response would have told Ho Chi Minh - '
no he's not with me'. The assumption would have been that MH370 was NORDO and still en-route to Beijing.
Ho Chi Minh center would have then been trying everything to contact the aircraft - and this was their task and their responsibility -
NOTHING to do with Subang center.
This is the way the rules are defined. That is why [
donning tin foil hat] it is said that this was an ideal place to break out of the system and stop cooperating with the surveillance systems. For a flight emergency to occur at
precisely that moment is possible but highly improbable.