Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak (centre) insisted that it had been ‘no small feat’ for Malaysia to pull together 26 countries in the international search for the missing Flight MH370. ― Picture by Saw Siow Feng

KUALA LUMPUR, May 14 — The Malaysian government did not “get everything right” in the search for a missing plane and the 239 people on board, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak conceded in an opinion piece on the Wall Street Journal.

Describing the loss of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 as “one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries”, Najib acknowledged that the lack of physical proof of the plane’s fate and a “clear explanation” of why the tragedy occurred had resulted in Malaysia facing the bulk of criticism for the aircraft’s disappearance.

But he insisted that it had been “no small feat” for Malaysia to pull together 26 countries in the international search for the plane, saying: “In the passage of time, I believe Malaysia will be credited for doing its best under near-impossible circumstances.”

“But we didn’t get everything right,” Najib wrote in the Op-Ed piece titled “Malaysia’s lessons from the vanished airplane” carried by the international business newspaper.

“In the first few days after the plane disappeared, we were so focused on trying to find the aircraft that we did not prioritize our communications.

“Also, it took air-traffic controllers four hours to launch the search-and-rescue operation,” he admitted.

But the prime minister pointed out that the aircraft had vanished at the precise moment when it was hovering between the traffic controls of two countries.

This caused “maximum confusion”, Najib wrote.

Nevertheless, he said, Malaysia’s search for the plane was launched about one-third quicker than in the 2009 crash of the Air France Flight 447.

Despite all these mitigating factors, however, Najib said the response time following the plane’s disappearance “should and will be investigated”.

Still, he added, “none of this could have altered MH370’s fate”.

He offered Malaysia’s full commitment to the ongoing probe on MH370’s disappearance to make sure lessons are learned, and noted that since the tragedy, the country’s airport security has been tightened.

Najib said the global aviation industry also has important lessons to learn from the MH370 crisis, listing down necessary changes to various technologies including the tracking of planes, communication systems and flight data recorders.

“These changes may not have prevented the MH370 or Air France 447 tragedies. But they would make it harder for an aircraft to simply disappear, and easier to find any aircraft that did. Which would help reassure the travelling public and reduce the chances of such a drawn-out disaster reoccurring,” he said.

In the 2009 crash, investigators found the crash site after five days and took nearly two years to find the Air France plane’s flight data recorders and main hull.

“The global aviation industry must not only learn the lessons of MH370 but implement them. The world learned from Air France but didn’t act. The same mistake must not be made again,” Najib concluded.

In the same opinion piece, Najib called for the introduction of real-time tracking of commercial planes and changes to prevent communications systems from being disabled during a flight.

Black boxes or flight data recorders should be improved beyond its two-hour capacity to record the cockpit conversation for the entire flight, while its location pingers should last at least 90 days instead of the current 30 days, he said.

The emergency locator transmitters of planes needs to be improved as their underwater performance is poor and their batteries last for 24 hours only, he said.

More than two months after the Beijing-bound MH370 disappeared, a search in the southern Indian Ocean is still going on with no wreckage of the plane found so far.

Yesterday, Australia was reported to have committed up to RM272 million for the next two years for the MH370 search where it is the lead coordinator.