Nearly three years after twin disasters took it to the brink of financial collapse, Malaysia Airlines' new CEO says the airline's recovery is going better than expected.
The search for the airline's Flight 370 that went missing in March 2014 with 239 people on board was suspended Tuesday.
Speaking before the search was called off, CEO Peter Bellew called the disaster an "awful tragedy."
"There's people I work with every day who lost some of their friends, so they're living with that," he said when asked about it Tuesday. "We owe it to the people that lost their lives and the families and everything to make sure that the place is a success and that it survives, because that's the right thing to do," Bellew said when asked about the disaster at an industry gathering in Hong Kong.
Bellew did not mention the Flight 370 disaster or the loss of another Boeing 777 carrying 298 people that was shot down over Ukraine months later in his speech to the group.
He said the airline is on track to meet key performance goals, including turning an annual profit by 2018 and relisting on the stock exchange the following year.
The company's jets are carrying more passengers, including on its London route, he said. London is the carrier's last remaining long-haul route and the only one where it uses superjumbo Airbus A380 jets that must carry many passengers to be profitable.
The tragedies in 2014 deepened the carrier's already daunting troubles.
An unsustainable network of routes, high operating costs and archaic online systems were symptoms of chronic mismanagement that had saddled the airline with at least $1.7 billion in losses since 2011.