"We, along with hundreds of
other airlines, have flown that route safely for quite some time," Hugh
Dunleavy, commercial director for Malaysia Airlines, told CNN's Saima Mohsin
over the weekend.
"Primarily we flew that
route because we were advised that this was a safe corridor and there would be
no incidents."
Dunleavy said the plane, which
was traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, adjusted its altitude on its way
across Europe under the direction of air traffic control.
Now, he said the airline is
reassessing the route it uses for that flight. And since Thursday's crash,
commercial airlines that usually cross eastern Ukraine on their flights to
Europe, Asia and elsewhere have been detouring away from the volatile region.
But far beyond Ukraine's borders,
analysts say the incident could pave the way for new guidelines for how close
planes can fly to conflict zones.
"The rules in aviation are
written in blood, or a tombstone mentality if you like," CNN aviation
analyst Miles O'Brien said. "What happens is, people die, and things get
safer."
David Soucie, a CNN safety
analyst and former FAA safety inspector, said the situation highlights the need
for change in an antiquated system that has what he calls a "flaw in the
evaluation of the risk."
"There had been aircraft
shot down just prior to this," Soucie said. "Someone should have
taken action."
Last week Eurocontrol, the agency
responsible for coordinating European airspace, said Ukrainian authorities had
closed airspace in the region below 32,000 feet, but it was open at the level
Flight 17 was flying (33,000 feet).
"There's a lot of questions
to be asked in a lot of different places," O'Brien said. "Malaysia,
for example, what about the airline policy? What did they inform crews and
flight dispatchers about flying through that particular part of the world? And
why didn't government officials close off that airspace completely? 32,000
feet, that's a completely arbitrary number."
The president of Dubai's Emirates
airline is calling for an international meeting of carriers to come up with a
response to the downing of the plane, Reuters reported on Sunday.
The U.N.'s International Civil
Aviation Organization can't close airspace, Emirates President Tim Clark told
Reuters, "but they can issue advisories and they may be a little more
active."
And national regulators "may
start getting involved a little more than they have," Clark said,
according to Reuters. "They have perhaps left airlines to their own
devices."
The airline chief's comments are
a good sign that changes soon could be in the works, O'Brien said.
Les Abend, a CNN aviation analyst
and commercial pilot, said before last week's crash, pilots weren't worried
about missiles hitting planes they were flying.
"None of us, I think, would
have conceived that kind of devastation from a surface-to-air missile," he
said. "Evading missiles (is) not part of our training. That's just
something that's not in our vocabulary at this point and time."
But now, he said, guidelines for
pilots will likely change.
"Now we've got a new threat
that we've got to deal with," he said. "Now we've lost lives."
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