Hoping for a miracleDISASTER struck Malaysia Airlines twice in 2014. In March, flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers and crew, disappeared an hour after take-off. Experts think it crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, though no one is sure why. Only a few fragments of debris have turned up, off Africa’s coast. Four months later Russian-backed militia in eastern Ukraine shot down MH17, another 777, killing all 298 people on board. Two years on, Malaysia’s struggling national carrier is still flying, but its financial health remains under scrutiny.
Both crashes appeared to have been beyond the firm’s control but hurt business nonetheless. Customers deserted the airline. Chinese flyers feared it was jinxed: sales in China, a crucial market, fell by 60% immediately after the first crash. Shortly after the second disaster, in August 2014, Malaysia’s government renationalised the airline, rescuing it from collapse.
In fact the airline was in a mess before the two tragedies. Malaysia last made a profit in 2010. In 2013 the firm lost $356m. As demand for air travel in the...Continue reading
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