Inmarsat: Malaysia's conclusion not only based on its data

British satellite company Inmarsat said that the Malaysian government's conclusion about missing flight MH370's fate was not based solely on its tracking data.

This photo taken on March 25, 2014, shows the exterior of Inmarsat headquarters in London. [Photo by Cecily Liu/China Daily]

The inability to quickly track the location of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 might cause a push to have all commercial aircraft tracked, which China could lead, said a senior executive at Inmarsat, ``It takes a major nation to step forward and say, ‘The world should track its commercial jets,’” said Chris McLaughlin, senior vice-president for external affairs at Inmarsat. McLaughlin compared the MH370 incident to the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic, which led to the establishment of International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) convention, a fundamental in the shipping industry, which is still in use today to protect the safety of ships.

“It does seem incomprehensible where you have passengers buying seats on aircrafts which you cannot possibly know where it has gone,’’ he said. “So it needs the leadership of China, the US and the UK and others to say, ‘It’s time to apply the technology we already have, and it’s time to track so that customers and passengers and families will all know with certainty where a commercial jet is.’’’.

If tracking of commercial aircraft is established going forward, it is “positive progress”, McLaughlin said.

“If you just imagine just over 100 years ago, ships at sea didn’t have to have their radio on to listen to other ships calling distress. If you imagine they didn’t have rules on the number of life boats they carried. They didn’t keep track of the people on board,’’ he said. ``You see great sadness like this can bring improvements to the wider human kind, and we would hope this will be the last time we ever have a discussion about an aircraft going missing when such a simple technology could be applied.”