With regards to the recent tragic crash of a Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) helicopter where all six on board sadly perished, Helpless Anak Malaysia wrote in to condemn in particular, guess who, yes, the deputy prime minister for seeing 'fit to continue allowing our air force to fly the Nuris after nearly four decades in operation.'

Apart from using the opportunity to dig at a submarine deal (involving guess who, yes, the DPM and Razak Baginda), he or she attributed the crash and thus the six lives to the Defence Ministry's decision to continue operating the Nuris.

An air crash could stem from a variety of causes, and the case of the latest Nuri crash is yet to be determined in a professional manner by aviation accident investigation experts. I get the bad feeling that Helpless Anak Malaysia's pre-emptive and highly ill-informed accusations and crocodile tears for the unfortunate families could be politically driven. They would be akin to the pronouncements of those American frontier days' vigilante corp, where an accused was guilty until proven innocent, assuming he or she could do it before the immediate execution by hanging or shooting.

We are yet to know whether the accident had been the cause of technical problems, structural failure, weather, procedural errors, human factors, etc.

Properly maintained old aircraft are not by themselves a safety problem. Many air forces around the world including the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) have operated and still do operate these older generation aircraft. For example, the RAAF operated the venerable C-47, a military version of the DC-3, for more than 50 years, from the early 1940s until the last two were retired in 1999.

Then there are the comparatively younger Caribous which saw service in the RAAF in 1964 during the Vietnam War and are still flying today. The RAAF Caribous are a lot older than the RMAF Nuris which only entered Malaysian service around 1968. Some Nuri airframes are actually much younger than 1968, when the fleet was expanded in later years.

Regrettably, it would seem that the Umno style of indiscriminate political dirt-smearing has been adopted by (or perhaps taken over to) by an opposition party and its supporters. You would not catch the other opposition party, the Democratic Action Party indulging in such despicable nonsense.