DHAKA: The mystery of how Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 flew into oblivion, and the challenge of finding new ways to track aircraft, will hang over the annual conference of airlines that opens Sunday in Doha.

The loss of the Malaysia Airlines plane, with 239 people on board, was a shock to the airline industry, and clouds the event in Doha just as it also celebrates 100 years of commercial aviation.

Aircraft being produced Sunday for the next expected boom in traffic are scarcely comparable to the biplanes which carried mail or seaplanes which later assured many long-distance routes before the age of electronic navigation.

The main purpose of this 70th annual meeting, organised by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), is to enable its 240 members accounting for 84.0 percent of global air traffic to talk about business prospects for the sector, reports the NDTV.

But the three-day get-together will open under the shadow of the Boeing 777 airliner which took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 bound for Beijing, but flew into danger leaving behind a trail of despair for relatives of the passengers and crew, muddle over what had happened, and mystery over where it had gone.

Various theories emerged about how and why the plane may have veered widely off course, and searches switched direction accordingly, but no debris has been found in the southern Indian Ocean where the aircraft is now believed to have looped far off course.

The drama also revealed to astonished public opinion that in an age of sophisticated civil and military radar scanning and of GPS satellite location and monitoring systems, an airliner can fly into apparent blind spots, leaving little or no trace.

This has led to calls for all airliners to be equipped at modest cost with extra emitters.

When IATA held its last annual meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2013 one of the matters raised was poor air transport safety in Africa.

BDST: 1047 HRS, JUN 01, 2014