MH370 to MH17: Inside Malaysia Airlines...

It started with another late-night phone call, another rush to the airport, where familiar faces in a familiar setting tried to make sense of nearly 300 more lives lost in the second disaster to strike Malaysia Airlines in the space of just a few months.

For a company and a nation still struggling to come to terms with the unsolved disappearance of Flight MH370 on March 8, Thursday's apparent shooting down of another Boeing 777 over eastern Ukraine was a devastating blow.

"For something like this to happen, just four months after MH370, just when we were beginning to get on with life, it is just very difficult to take," one airline executive told Reuters at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, sobbing as he spoke.

"You can't imagine how draining it is, how emotional it is. Everyone can't believe this is happening again, we are going through all of the emotions once again."

After the earlier tragedy, politicians and airline officials were slow to acknowledge the plane had gone missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and then gave confusing, sometimes contradictory statements.

On Thursday, the news began to filter in just after 11 p.m. local time that something had gone wrong with Flight MH17 scheduled from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Soon after, Malaysian Airline System Bhd executives were awakened and dispatched to the airport to help set up emergency operations, according to interviews with company officials.

"When we entered the room, we looked around and saw the same colleagues, the same familiar faces, that we saw during MH370," said one government official. "And almost everyone was sighing. Gosh, we could not believe that something like this was happening once again."

By 11:30 pm, Malaysia Airlines (MAS) officials knew from television footage and then confirmation from Ukraine authorities that the plane had gone down. The airline announced on its official Twitter feed that it had lost contact with the aircraft - a change from the March disaster when it was roundly criticised for waiting six hours before acknowledging MH370 was missing.

Before midnight, the officials realised that the 298 passengers and crew were most likely dead.

"People knew the drill this time around - everyone was focused on what they had to do," the government official said. "MAS, the government, the different agencies, the politicians. Everyone had a role and they knew what it was."

MH370

In March, it took about four hours for Malaysia Airlines to announce that the Boeing 777 was missing while traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

The airport was soon overwhelmed with angry relatives screaming and begging for answers — and holding out hope that the plane had landed somewhere or their loved ones were still alive.

But the answers would not come.  Not that day, and for many, not up until now.

Most of the passengers were from China, and the first batch of kin had arrived from Beijing on the third day of what has become the biggest aviation mystery in the world. Investigators announced that the plane had vanished from radar screens, flying for hours to the southern Indian Ocean where it was last traced by satellite pings.

That did little to calm the relatives, some of whom accused the Malaysian government of conspiracy, hiding the truth and ineptitude.

People were shouting. Crying hysterically. Pointing fingers at officials only to be met with blank stares.

MH17

This Friday, and the airport was receiving crying relatives again.
This time, they knew the outcome of the disaster. The wreckage of the Boeing 777 was found, scattered over a Ukrainian field after a suspected missile shot it down. Most of the casualties were Dutch with 44 Malaysians, including 15 crew and two infants.

No one is wailing. No one is making a scene. There is no hope of anyone being found alive.

Counseling is set up immediately. The government addresses a stunned nation and the world without hours, at 4 a.m.
The relatives are briefed by a government minister. There is no storming out of the meeting.

The Malaysian government is not taking the blame. It falls on those responsible for shooting down the aircraft.

PRE-DAWN CALL

This time, the decision was made early that there would be only one spokesperson - Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai, who was had only been appointed late last month.

Before dawn, Prime Minister Najib Razak spoke with US President Barack Obama and issued a detailed statement spelling out what had happened and vowing swift justice for the perpetrators.

"We were better prepared for this, we got the statements out fast and verified everything quickly," a second government official said.
Oliver McGee, a former senior US Transportation Department official, said it was unprecedented for a commercial airline to suffer two tragedies in such rapid succession with more than 530 people dead.

"Malaysia Airlines is now in the fog of the greatest crisis in international aviation safety and security history," McGee said. "I don't see how Malaysia is going to recover from this as a firm."

Defence Minister and former Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, the public face of the government during the MH370 crisis, tweeted early Friday morning that he was asking the military to confirm reports that the aircraft had been shot down.

"MH17: If indeed our plane was brought down, those responsible WILL be brought to justice!" he wrote.
 

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