Mr Chairman,
Mr Secretary General,
Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,
Every four years, Malaysia, together with the Membership of the ITU, reiterates our unwavering support and commitment towards the Union its goals.
At this PP, my delegation and I are single-minded in our goal to convince this Conference of only one thing.
When I last addressed the ITU, at the WTDC in Dubai, Malaysia had just lost an aeroplane – in the early hours of 8 March this year, one of our Boeing 777s, flight MH 370, disappeared without a trace on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
With the help of the international community, we launched the largest and most expensive search in history to locate the missing aircraft. To this day, there has not been a trace of MH 370. And, the search continues for the plane, passengers, crew, and, its black boxes.
Four and a half months later, Malaysia lost another Boeing 777 – flight MH 17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine on 17 July, and along with it, all 298 passengers and crew, including 83 children. This time, the black boxes were recovered. But it took time to negotiate for them to be returned, and more time to retrieve the data.
What happened to MH 370 had already strengthened our resolve to stand with the ITU, to make sure, that we extract the most benefit from ICT towards saving lives.
With two air tragedies, Malaysia is determined to do our part to intensify efforts for ICT to play an even bigger role in the aviation industry.
More than ever, I believe that locating and searching for the black box should be a thing of the past, because it is technology from the 60s.
Even more so, I am certain that today's technology should be transmitting data from aircraft, including from the black box, in real-time.
I thank the ITU for acting so swiftly on Malaysia's call to work with industry experts to find a way to establish international standards for real-time monitoring of flight data. Together with the ICAO, the Expert Group Dialogue held in Kuala Lumpur in May this year, issued a Communique which has given both ICT and aviation experts the impetus to further this work. Interestingly, the issue, is not about, technology.
As a proposed action in the Communique, some participants called upon ITU to take action, at the earliest opportunity, to provide the necessary spectrum allocations as emerging aviation needs are identified.
The meeting encouraged ITU to continue to study, and address current and future spectrum requirements, for flight tracking, and real-time flight data monitoring, and make appropriate allocations, at upcoming World Radiocommunication Conferences, including WRC 2015.
Malaysia stands steadfastly behind the ITU to facilitate an open, multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder and performance-based approach, towards the establishment of international standards, for the use of an aviation cloud, for real-time monitoring of flight data.
Malaysia is thankful that at least four regions have submitted proposals regarding this, to this PP. Today, there are approximately 100,000 scheduled commercial flights daily.
As such, we call for this Conference to take a united stand in urging the WRC 2015 to take swift and affirmative action on this matter.
Mr Chairman, we congratulate you on your appointment, and thank the Republic of Korea for hosting this Conference.
Mr Secretary General, we also commend you and your team for organising what we believe, will be one of the most challenging PPs, in the history of the Union.
Malaysia has very high expectations from this PP; that it will help us to make sure that air travel will be safer - because of ICT, and because, we trust in the ITU, to make a difference. Thank you.
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