The Excuse given as to why the unidentified plane was not intercepted

From Parliament House.

 The Royal Malaysia Air Force (RMAF) did not probe an unidentified aircraft signal which appeared on the military radar in the wee hours of March 8 because it ‘assumed’ that the flight was ordered to turn back by the civilian air traffic control.

In revealing this today, Deputy Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Bakri said the air force decided to ignore the radar signal because the aircraft was categorised as non-hostile in nature.

“We thought the aircraft was non-hostile, we assumed it was a directive of the control tower that had directed the plane to turn back,” he told the Dewan Rakyat today.

I was waiting for this answer as to why our TUDM did not respond to the intrusion of an unidentified plane. The answer is TUDM assumed a number of things; chief being the plane must have been ordered to do so by Subang. Then it concluded that this plane, although unidentified is not hostile. Not a very good answer which shows the standard of the deputy defence minister.

That answer pales for example from the one given by a commentator in my blog.

The answer given by the commentator ran as follows:-

"Most military radar isn't concerned with commercial air traffic on standard routes flying at 30,000+ feet. The skies are full of jetliners. Most just appear as a contact on a tracking scope, watched briefly as they trundle along in a straight line across the sky, and are then ignored. Military people are concerned with threats. Threats typically move in a ballistic trajectory, or a flat fast powered arc, or much closer to the surface. Military radar records might be helpful in figuring out what happened, but unless Flight 370 was behaving like a threat while passing through somebody’s radar envelope, it’s unlikely that anybody would notice or bother to identify it.

The answer given by the deputy defence minister is exactly the answer relished by potential enemies. What if our enemies use lethal flying objects camouflaged as civilian carriers displaying the characteristics so described by the commentator?  So because the unidentified object appear as a contact on a tracking scope, they are watched briefly as they trundle along in a straight line across the sky, and are then ignored.

We ignore at our peril then. Our enemies can easily out-think this sort of complacent and cavalier attitude on the part of military people. Let’s pray they don’t operate on these lines even though our confidence is shattered as a result of the conduct in the MH370 case.