A Year After MH17, Intelligence Agencies Slow to Share Threat Data With Pilots - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2015/07/17/world/europe/17reuters-ukraine-crisis-mh17-airlines.html
A year after the downing of MH17, Europe’s intelligence agencies remain reluctant to share information that might help airlines detect threats from ground-based conflicts in future, the region’s aviation safety chief said on Friday.
Malaysia Airlines flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17 last year during fighting between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatist rebels.
The United Nations has introduced a system for centralizing the safety notices for pilots already issued across the world, but the European Union’s safety regulator wants to go further.
Patrick Ky, executive director of the European Aviation Safety Agency, has urged the EU’s 28 nations to set up an alert system to process sensitive data and issue warnings to airlines.
It has begun talks with EU military representatives over how such a system would work in practice.
But speaking to Reuters on the anniversary of the downing of MH17, Ky said talks were moving slowly.
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“Progress is slow, I have to acknowledge, because we are dealing with organizations which are not really programmed to share information: military intelligence agencies basically.”
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One of the difficulties in getting the various agencies to co-operate to help pilots commercial avoid conflicts is getting everyone to agree what is, or isn’t, a war zone, Ky said.