Asia Buzz: Plain Facts

The crash of SQ006 in Taipei last October 31 was a terrible tragedy -- for the passengers and crew, their loved ones, Singapore Airlines and for Singapore itself. The public outpouring of grief was unprecedented for the republic.

It was also a test for the city-state's information control regime -- the authorities said from the beginning that they would be judged by the public (and not just Singapore's) over their level of openness in dealing with the crisis.

The accident happened outside Singapore, involved a range of foreign nationals, and most challenging of all, concerned grief and tragedy. In this very delicate situation, it's easy for an airline, particularly one that adopts such a high- profile ambassadorial role for a nation, to be assessed by its actions.

The SIA crisis could be likened to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in 1986 when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev had just become General Secretary of the Communist Party. As radiation from the leak drifted over Western Europe, it was impossible for Moscow to deny, as had been their wont in previous times that anything had happened. The reformist Gorby seized the moment and, in the main, declared the crisis open for examination. It was the beginning of the period we now know as glasnost, or openness.

Singapore, too, is going through a reform process, though not nearly as one as dramatic as the former USSR. It has permitted a Speaker's Corner, modeled on its namesake in London's Hyde Park, and journalists reckon the so-called out-of- bounds markers for the local media are as wide as they can remember. If the New York Times newspaper is 10 and the Pyongyang Times is 0 -- on the scale of openness -- former Straits Times editor-in-chief Peter Lim says the local press now ranks about 5-6.

As for SIA and the way it handled the SQ006 tragedy, so far the reviews have been good. The letters pages of the Straits Times have been full of praise (but then they often are) and foreign experts like Atlanta-based Dr. Carolyn Coarsey- Rader of Higher Resources, a company that specializes in disaster preparedness for the airline industry, says SIA has been "brilliant" in compassionate crisis management. After early hiccups, where SIA was late to acknowledge the extent of the disaster, it later dispatched about 200 "buddies" around the world to counsel families who had loved ones in the tragedy. And it promised compensation.

But there is still room for improvement. If you are looking for information about the crash from the airline's official website, you'll be disappointed. Less than three months after the crash, the website reads as if it never happened.

According to SIA press official Innes Willox, the former press secretary of Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, and thus a professional skilled in dealing with official gaffes, SIA has issued "about 20" press releases on the SQ006 crash. But not one of them is to be found on the SIA website. There's not even a condolence page. You have to go to the website of Channel News Asia for that.

Compare that to the websites of Air France and Alaska Airlines, where there is extensive information and links about the Air France Concorde crash back in July and Alaska's Flight 261, which came down off LA a year ago.

Websites are the shop fronts of the new millennium, and of course you don't put damaged goods in the window. SIA can choose to handle information about the SQ006 tragedy however it likes. But as far the Internet is concerned, it has some way to go before it implements the world's best practices of transparency its government has made a worthy priority for corporate Singapore.