KUALA LUMPUR, May 2 — French authorities took up to seven hours to respond to the disappearance of Air France flight AF447 in 2009, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said amid questions over Malaysia’s reaction time in the loss of Flight MH370.

The acting transport minister said he was informed such by Jean-Paul Troadec, an expert in the search for Flight 447 that crashed in 2009, in their meeting here in Kuala Lumpur earlier today.

“On whether four hours is long or not, it’s not for us to discuss it here,” Hishammuddin said in a press conference today.

The minister insisted the difference in response times in the two incidents indicated that there was no benchmark by which to gauge the swiftness — or delay — of Malaysia’s reaction.

Hishammuddin added that any such determination would be up to the international investigation team that is investigating the disappearance of the still-missing plane.

Putrajaya yesterday issued the preliminary report on Flight MH370 that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak pledged last week to release, along with other information regarding the missing flight.

But the release has renewed scrutiny over Malaysia’s response to the flight that disappeared in the early hours of March 8 while on its way to Beijing, China with 239 people on board.

Among others, the disclosed documents revealed that confusion that began shortly after the plane dropped off civilian radar and search efforts that were not initiated until four hours after this happened.

The confusion echoes a fumble when AF447 vanished over the Atlantic five years ago. Controllers at first mistook a virtual flight path for the plane’s actual course, according to an official report, which may have delayed a search operation.

Searchers scouring the vast swathes of the remote Indian Ocean off the coast of Perth in Australia have yet to find any evidence of MH370, and have begun scaling back the search for the plane that has been missing for nearly two months.