MH17 report raises questions of oversight

The chilling details of the final moments of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, as released by the Dutch Safety Board earlier this week, will hardly provide any closure for the grieving relatives of the 298 passengers and crew who were on board the Boeing 777-200. The board led a 15-month multinational investigation into what crashed the plane flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, although the final findings steered away from determining who was responsible for it.

The Ukrainian government has been quick to point fingers at pro-Russian rebel forces for the disaster, though a senior Ukrainian rebel leader has strongly rejected the report as improper and incomplete. While the Dutch report said the flight was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile from eastern Ukraine, Russia’s state-run missile manufacturer said the Buk missile was fired from a town under the control of Ukrainian government forces and that the puncture marks on the plane’s fuselage indicated the missile was an older Soviet-era one that Russia no longer produces.

Even as the question of who was responsible for shooting down MH17 remains unanswered, the Kremlin has condemned the Dutch investigation as “biased” and an “attempt to carry out a political order”, demanding a fresh inquiry into the incident by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, a United Nations agency.

However, the report also contains a damning indictment of the irresponsibility that set the scene for such a tragedy to unfold in the first place. July 2014 — which is when the flight crashed — was the height of conflict between government troops and pro-Russian rebels, and specifically the battle in Shakhtarsk Raion where the flight was shot down. As the report concluded, the airspace above the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine should have been closed, but no one considered that civil aircraft at cruising altitude were at risk. With plenty of existing coordination between nations and commercial carriers on flight routes, it is unfortunate that no single agency has the oversight of carriers that run the risk of flying into war zones. While conflict-ridden states need to do more to protect civil aviation, flight operators globally also need to increase the transparency about their flight routes to ensure there’s no repeat of the MH17 tragedy ever again.