Without the Word Cluster

A lot of questions popped up after the Malaysian airliner was shot down over the Ukraine – or over the disputed part of the country that a separatist group claims is rightfully part of Russia, depending on your point of view. People are questioning where the missile that brought down the plane was fired from, and by who; people have questioned how closely the Russians are involved in the supposed civil war, and what role this plays in Mr. Putin’s eventual plans for the region or the world; people have questioned whether the American satellite footage is real, and even if it is, what role this plays in Mr. Obama’s eventual plans for whatever it is people think the President is doing this time. The most basic question of all, I can’t help thinking, is why a civilian airliner was flying over a war zone in the first place – and, unfortunately, that’s even more complicated than most of the other questions…

A story this week from the NBC News site pointed out that there really isn’t any one agency with the ability to declare any particular airspace off-limits for reasons of safety or anything else. There is a United Nations aviation agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), headquartered in Montreal, that issues warnings and advisories to all member nations, but the ICAO has no ability to impose or enforce no-fly zones. Individual countries can declare their own airspace unsafe, but can’t be compelled to do so according to treaties dating back to the end of World War I, and Ukrainian authorities had declared the route Malaysia Airlines M17 was flying to be safe. Various military coalitions have declared no-fly zones over the years, but there is no such group involved in the Ukrainian civil war; The Netherlands are part of NATO, but Ukraine isn’t…

Ultimately, the only thing most pilots have to go on are temporary restrictions, usually called Notices to Airmen or NOTAMs, which can be issued by (or occasionally about) specific airports or air corridors by local air traffic controllers or national aviation agencies. No US carriers were flying through Ukrainian airspace at the time because the FAA had issues such a warning, but there is no consistency over what constitutes a credible threat from one country to another, or even one controller to another. And meanwhile, every airline in the world is under pressure to control costs (and keep fares low), which means using the fastest and more direct routes possible between destinations – even when that means flying over a warzone populated by trigger-happy pro-Russian idiots…

Now, we should probably note that with the exception of the United States and a handful of other countries, most national governments don’t have the intelligence assets available to assess the threat levels present along various air routes, let alone the airlines from that country. It might be possible to avoid all flight routes that pass through even questionable airspace, but only at the risk of driving airfares to a price level that will exceed what the public is willing to pay, thus losing all customers and eventually bankrupting the company. The truth is that air travel can never be made completely risk-free, and consequently every airline has to find a balance between risk and profitability that it is willing to accept. And with no International standard to follow, some companies end up making bad choices…

It’s easy to criticize Malaysia Airlines for flying over a war zone, but at this point in history the collection of local, national and international warning systems – none of which has any authority over anyone but the home country’s airlines – is so ridiculously complicated and miserably ineffectual that it can’t really be described without the use of the word “cluster” in there somewhere. And even if it becomes possible to appoint an international agency to actually restrict unsafe air corridors and give the definitive word on destinations, that still won’t protect carriers or their passengers from rapidly-shifting lines of battle, missile batteries that aren’t supposed to be in a given area, or idiots lobbing random projectiles into the general area of somebody else’s airport…