KUALA LUMPUR, March 20 — The odds are heavily stacked against struggling flag carrier Malaysia Airlines (MAS) as its passenger jetliner vanished into the void barely two months into the start of the Visit Malaysia Year that was to reverse its flagging fortunes.
Yet with the frenzied and sensational media coverage of the missing flight MH370, there is a thin silver lining — many travellers have come to accept that the disappearance midflight to be a singularly remote phenomenon.
One such flyer was businessman, Tengku Yusof Tengku Zainal Karib Shah, who was catching a flight to Singapore Tuesday.
“These things happen one in a million,” Tengku Yusof told The Malay Mail Online at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport terminus in Sepang.
A day earlier, he had seen his mother take off on a MAS flight to Mecca.
The 47-year-old entrepreneur smiled and shook his head when asked if he feared flying after the jetliner carrying 239 people vanished into thin air, prompting a global hunt over millions of square nautical miles of land, sea and airspace running as far north as China and India, and all the way down to the southern tip of the Indian Ocean.
“Danger is everywhere. If there’s a chandelier above us, it can just drop on your head,” he said, sounding most pragmatic.
Analysts have also shrugged off the impact of what may be one of the world’s biggest aviation mysteries, saying that the incident will not make a significant dent on Malaysia’s robust aviation industry.
Ravi Madavaram, aerospace and defence consultant from consulting firm Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific, said the MH370 crisis would likely affect MAS’ revenue only in the short term.
“After two to three years, people tend to forget. The Air France case was one of the most public cases at that time. However, now, nobody remembers who said what,” Ravi told The Malay Mail Online.
In 2009, Air France Flight 447 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people on board. The bulk of the wreckage of the Airbus plane, its flight black box recorders, and the majority of bodies were found only two years later after four searches.
Ravi noted, however, that incidental expenses resulting from the disappearance of the aircraft could take a hit on MAS’ earnings.
An American aviation lawyer was reported by US magazine Foreign Policy recently as saying that an international aviation convention requires MAS to pay the family of each passenger on MH370 up to US$150,000 (RM490,000). There were 227 passengers on the plane, most of whom were Chinese nationals.
Daniel Wong, an analyst with Hong Leong Investment Bank in Malaysia, said that people will continue travelling, barring major incidents like the 2003 SARS epidemic, a global financial crisis, political crises, or terrorist attacks.
“Worst scenario is if Malaysia is being branded a terrorist country, else travelling will still be there,” Wong told The Malay Mail Online.
As investigation into MH370 progresses, investigators have discounted the possibility of terrorism in the flight’s disappearance, and continue to lean in the direction of sabotage and hijacking.
Another aviation industry analyst noted that passenger volume for Air France did not fall following the crash of AF447 on 2009, registering just a single monthly decline in November the same year.
“The Malaysian aviation industry is still strong. The demand for travel is still strong,” said the analyst, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
He also told The Malay Mail Online that the MH370 incident may drive MAS to compete more fiercely with other airlines in the local market that is dominated by the state-owned carrier and budget airline AirAsia, with hybrid airline Malindo Air recently entering the sector last year.
“Competition on airfares has been very intense,” said the analyst.
The MH370 crisis hit MAS just as the national carrier recorded a whopping RM1.17 billion loss in 2013, prompting business newspaper Singapore’s Business Times to advise bankruptcy in order to provide a fresh start for the government-linked company that has been struggling for the past several years.
People whom The Malay Mail Online spoke to at KLIA on Monday said that the MH370 case did not change their minds about travelling or cause them to cancel flights.
“They said it’s unprecedented, plus MAS has a very good track record. They’ve built our trust over the years,” said public relations director Andora Fredericks, whose husband was flying to Sydney, Australia, on Monday night on MAS.
A Malaysian Christian man, who was headed to Israel with 39 fellow church members, described the disappearance of the plane - which is now the longest in modern commercial aviation - as a “one-off incident”.
“We have faith in God,” said the man, who wanted to remain anonymous.
A MAS cabin crew member who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Malay Mail Online that flights have been full as usual.
“It’s been fairly busy as usual. Not much changes,” he said.
