As the needle-in-haystack search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight has became the longest in modern commercial aviation, the unprecedented disaster has exposed serious communications gaps at 35,000ft cruising altitude.

Whoever was operating MH370 went to great lengths to avoid being detected, shutting off the plane’s transponder and a text-to-ground messaging system before turning the Boeing 777-200 off its course to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.

While not ruling out hijacking or sabotage, Malaysian officials are now investigating the pilots.

It is too early to surmise that either of the pilot was involved, especially captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah as he is now confirmed to have been an active supporter of Malaysia’s opposition party. Its leader Anwar Ibrahim said yesterday it was unfair to link Shah to the missing flight just because he was a supporter.

But here are some hard-to-digest reports. Anwar did admit that Shah was present on March 7 as the appellate court sentenced Anwar to five years in jail for alleged sodomy. Anwar also admitted that Shah was related to his daughter-in-law and he could recall meeting him several times at party functions, according to reports in Malaysian media.

British tabloid Daily Mail reported that Shah went straight to the airport for MH370 after Anwar’s conviction.

Malaysia’s response to the disaster has been pathetic. It is now confirmed that the plane flew undetected for almost seven hours over many airspaces since it made the last contact with the ground. If precious seven hours lost in crisis management reflects badly on Malaysia, it also exposes gaping holes in the much-vaunted air defences of many a country in the region.

Two US security officials said on Monday that Malaysia had still not invited the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has extensive experience in investigating plane disasters, to send a team.

But in a world where Google knows your shopping habits and police use mobile phones to pinpoint locations of emergency calls, how can a high-tech aircraft designed for all possible emergencies just fall off the grid?

The silencing of most communications from MH370 exposes how easily the voice, radar and satellite links in a modern plane can be disabled. The mystery may spur a redesign of switches that let pilots sever the connections, and fast adoption of satellite technology for real-time tracking of planes, according to George Hamlin, a former Airbus executive. “The book of (aviation) rules is written in blood,” he says. “Many of the rules were written because people discovered how things could go wrong that were unknown before.”

Experts now should also think of devising a pre-flight psychological assessment of the crew, especially the pilots, to gauge their mental fitness to fly. Because if an MH370 pilot really did bring down the plane in an act of suicide, it sure would have been a very rare case, though not the first, in aviation history. There have been at least six airline crashes killing a total of 465 people that were caused by intentional actions by airline employees since 1982, according to AviationSafetyNetwork, which tracks accident data.

It is, indeed, distasteful to put a price on human life. But the precious lives lost of 239 people onboard MH370 should at least bring about fool-proof improvements in airline safety measures.

If aviation rules are “written in blood,” every life should count.