Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash: How can civilian aircraft be protected from mistaken military attacks?

By: Sreeram Chaulia

The shocking shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines plane in Ukraine’s troubled Donetsk region is a reminder of the perils of civil aviation when it gets entangled in military conflict.

With all 298 people on board killed in a gruesome manner, the incident will go down in aviation history as a tragedy when armed conflict snatched away a planeload of civilians who had no connection whatsoever to a war raging far below them.

Contemporary wars are deadly because combatants victimize unarmed civilians. MH17, which was airborne at a height of 33,000 feet, got drawn into the vortex of the grinding fighting between pro-Russian separatists and the central government of Ukraine.

The war in eastern Ukraine has claimed over 400 lives in three months. One moment of miscalculation by blunderers in possession of medium-range antiaircraft missiles who shot down MH17 under the impression that it was a military jet has almost doubled the casualties of the war.

History Repeats Itself

Prior to this accident, three civilian aircraft had suffered similar fates. In 1983, a Korean Air flight with 269 people was mistaken as an American spy plane and shot down by a Soviet military jet. In 1988, the US military mistook an Iran Air flight for a fighter aircraft and brought it down in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board.

In 2001, the Ukrainian military destroyed a Siberia Airlines flight carrying 78 persons with an errant missile fired during simulation exercises. Unlike terrorists deliberately planting bombs in civilian aircraft and triggering explosions, inadvertent attacks by regular militaries on civilian planes are more poignant because they are unintentional and avoidable.

Clarity on Airspace Use

Mainstream armies of stable states are trained to distinguish between civilian and military objects in airspace and have techniques of differentiating between the two types of planes. Assumptions that no sane army or rebel movement would willingly target unrelated commercial aircraft lay behind the lack of any generalized warning from civil aviation authorities for planes to keep off the airspace of eastern Ukraine.

Since attacking military jets became a prominent feature of the rebellion this year, the Ukrainian government did issue a no-fly warning in the air zone in the east of the country up to 32,000 feet. MH17 was flying above this limit but unluckily fell within the striking range of an advanced missile that none imagined could fall into unprofessional hands.

Now, the question of how civilian aircraft can be protected from mistaken military attacks needs to be considered seriously to avert future mishaps. Should the whole air above war zones where one or more parties has access to lethal weaponry, such as the Buk medium-range surface-to-air missiles reported to have been used against MH17, be declared no-fly areas for civilian air traffic? This is a logical precaution despite cumbersome rerouting and logistical hassles.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) governs a regime called ‘flexible use of airspace’ (FUA), which designates flying zones as neither purely civil nor purely military but “rather a continuum in which all user requirements are accommodated to the greatest possible extent”. This entails effective civilmilitary coordination, interoperability and jointly agreed reservations and restrictions on airspace use.

Finding a Solution

The MH17 crash highlights the need for improved cross-border collaboration among civilian and military airspace authorities to improve what the ICAO terms as “separation standards between civil and military flights.” But unruly and violent non-state actors such as rebels in eastern Ukraine rarely respect international regulations. Even the Russian government, which been sympathetic to these militants, is unable to discipline them.

As guerrilla fighters who are impervious to advice from governments remain outside the ambit of rational international rules and regulations, the only solution is to secure long-term political settlements with them. Just as maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia cannot be quelled unless there is peace on land in Somalia, aerial misadventures involving non-state actors can be halted only through negotiated diplomatic deals on the ground.

International indifference to the turmoil in Ukraine, which has been globalized by the MH17 crash, is not an option. Big powers which are shedding crocodile tears after the accident have in reality cynically fuelled the war for strategic purposes.

If this calamity pushes Ukraine, Russia and the Western powers to abandon brinkmanship and conclude a mutually agreeable truce, it would bring some consolation and restore order to a lawless frontier on Europe’s periphery.

(The writer is a professor and dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs)