Airline community "needs to respond" to mh17 attack

A Malaysia Airlines craft from 2008 Photo: Caribb

The Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was downed at the end of last week over Eastern Ukraine, when a missile is thought to have hit it. All 298 people on board died in the tragic disaster, which is currently being investigated by authorities.

While political tensions increase around discussions of the situation and the location of the currently missing black boxes, Tim Clark, president of Dubai's Emirates, has said that the international airline community needs to respond and make it clear that such an attack is "not acceptable and outrageous".

"[We] won't tolerate being targeted in internecine regional conflicts that have nothing to do with airlines," he told Reuters, calling for an International Air Transport Association conference to see what changes could be made to help th industry deal with regional instability.

"If you go East to West or vice-versa between Europe and Asia, you are likely to run into areas of conflict," said Clark.

"We have traditionally been able to manage this... That was up until three days ago. Now I think there will have to be new protocols and it will be up to ICAO and IATA and the aviation community to sort out what the protocols have to be."

Other officials are also dealing with the incident's impact upon the tourism industry, although Malaysian Tourism Minister Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz told The Malay Mail Online today that tourists were still coming to the country for their summer vacations, with no cancellations of tour packages imminent.

"Tourists from western Europe, western Russia, as well as Scandinavian and Benelux countries, use this flight sector to travel to Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand on Malaysia Airlines (MAS), which is also a code share with KLM,” said Nazri in a statement.

Visitor arrivals totalled 31,945 across the first four months of 2014, 13.5 per cent higher than the same period in 2013.