MH17 down near Donetsk

[Bergerie1]

Many years ago, when I was with a major airline, I was involved in the decision making process assessing the safety of flights, near, around or over areas of potential or active conflicts. From that experience, may I enlighten some of the posters on PPRuNe on the difficulties of the process.


The first problem is imprecise information, a civil airline is not told much - you have to go and investigate yourself. NOTAMS only promulgate what the state concerned has decided to say - airspace, airways closures and altitude restrictions. Next, the government of the state of registration may issue warnings, usually in ambiguous phraseology; 'we see no reason why you shouldn't', etc. Unless individuals in the airline concerned have the necessary security clearances and access to the right military/security departments, they will find it very difficult to determine the risk.

Then there is the eternal conflict between commercial interests and caution. This is a legitimate and important debate, there are no simple answers. How does the responsible person in Flight Operations convince the Commercial Department of the necessity to re-route around the conflict area when there is little or no convincing evidence of risk?

I remember several cases when the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) was less than candid, and others when they issued advice that was much more restrictive than the advice given by other governments. How do you evaluate what you are being told by government? Such issues applied when deciding to overfly Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, and when flying around Iraq during the run up to Gulf War 1 in 1991. These are not easy decisions.

Terrorist or military risk must be assessed on the basis of 2 criteria - capability and intention...and probably a 3rd - incompetence. In the case of Afghanistan, before the Russians retreated, they had the capability but not the intention to shoot down an overflying civil airliner, they also had good command and control. After the Russians withdrew, the various factions had the missiles (capability), probably not the intention, but more importantly they lacked effective command and control. Therefore they constituted a risk and that airspace was avoided by UK airlines but not those of all other nations.

When the USS Vincennes shot down the Iranian Airbus, the US Navy had the capability, no intention to shoot down a civil airliner, but woefully inadequate command decisions (the command and control structure was OK but it was operated incompetently). During the run up to Gulf War 1 the capability was there, as was a very good command and control structure - BUT - at what point might the stress of the moment lead to a mistake?

As I understand it, the airspace in which the Malaysian flight was operating was declared open by the state involved, was being used by many other airlines, and thus the flight was legal. The problem was; who had access to the missiles concerned? Who had knowledge of this? And how could this be assessed? Probably no-one was in a position to know. It seems to me to have been a horrible cock-up by the rebel forces. I am sure no-one intended to shoot down a civil airliner.

But, please don't under-estimate the difficulty airlines have when deciding what is and what is not safe.