The first anniversary of the disappearance of MH370 falls on Sunday. The Malaysian Airlines plane with its 239 passengers and crew vanished after leaving Kuala Lumpur en route for Beijing on 8 March 2014. After thousands of hours of searching by many different countries and agencies, there is still no trace of the missing aircraft, which is presumed to have crashed into the sea and sunk deep into the Indian Ocean, some 1,600 kilometers off the west coast of Australia. As the anniversary of this heartbreaking mystery approaches, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott gave the strongest hint yet that the once massive search for the wreckage of MH370 is being further scaled back. Indeed, there are many experts who think it should be abandoned altogether. Any decision to call off further efforts to locate the aircraft is bound to cause outrage among the mainly Chinese relatives, whose anger and despair was not helped by what they perceived as insensitive treatment by the Malaysian authorities in the days immediately following the tragedy. However, the harsh truth is that there were always two rather different driving forces behind the search and one of them is fast running out of steam. For the relatives, the overriding motive for the continuation of the search was the issue of closure. Even if the wreckage were discovered deep on the ocean floor, the bodies of their loved ones would not have been recovered. A remote-controlled robot would have sought out the two “black box” flight recorders and then the wreckage would have been left as a tomb for all those aboard. But at least the distraught families would have known where their loved ones were at rest. The discovery of the aircraft would also have ended the wild hopes, which reportedly still exist with some of the grieving, that Flight MH370 landed at some remote airstrip and that the passengers and crew are still alive, but for whatever mysterious reason have not yet been able to reveal their location. Such desperate speculation does not help those who have managed to resign themselves to the likelihood that the Boeing 777 and those aboard it will never be found. The more important driving force, however, has been the need for airlines and international aviation authorities to discover exactly what happened, precisely what went wrong. Ostensibly fail-safe onboard equipment that would have given the aircraft's position either failed or was deliberately turned off. Yet, the chances of discovering the flight recorders in 60,000 square miles of ocean were always slim, especially if the aircraft broke up when it hit the sea. So now the aviation industry can do no more than introduce mandatory measures to avoid a passenger aircraft ever again disappearing off the radar. A year on from the MH370 disaster, it might be argued that far too little has so far been done in this respect. There is a long-term initiative to have flight recorders mounted on aircraft so that in the event of a crash at sea, they would disengage and float to the surface. But this will require major aircraft redesign. In the short-term, improved battery life will enable the locator beacons to work for longer while steps must be take to ensure that automatic identification systems cannot be turned off by human intervention or fail for any other reason. The best closure for everyone, including the grieving relatives of the folk aboard MH370, is to make certain that no other airliner will be able to vanish without a trace.
