Without putting an exact percentage on it, I'd say the press have contributed a large portion of the current tension there seems to be around Malaysian.
At the time of MH17 being downed in Ukraine, most carriers with routes over the territory weren't diverting; obviously the world was aware of fighting in Ukraine, but (without making light of it) before and after the MH17 incident it's basically been a conflict of localised ground skirmishes. The situation with routes over Syria is pretty complicated, but at the same time simple - there's quite a lot of landmass in that region which might be deemed similarly troubled; diversions to avoid the corner (and in most cases it is only a corner) of Syria would be quite significant (to the point of necessitating alterations to en-route stops) if they were sufficient to exclude similarly questionable neighbouring airspace.
The papers make much of routes over places like Ukraine and Syria; but as usual they never really expand on it - it's probably not too wild a generalisation to say that not many people would be flying anywhere if all airspace over areas of conflict was declared no-fly; there are the headline-making conflicts, and then there are orders of mangnitude more which just aren't in the 10 o'clock news every night. The papers like to make it sound reckless or negligent, but of course there's risk in pracically everything we do, and the odds of a widebody jet at 35,000ft or above doing 550mph across the ground squawking an obviously civilian ident being shot down are infinitessimal - it's quite difficult to do on purpose, never mind by accident. That's not to say there haven't been [tenuously] similar incidents in the past, but the circumstances have been different enough to mean the MH17 incident is quite unique - Two of the most widely reported in the last 30 years being Korean 007 which was misidentified as an American spy plane in Russian airspace and shot down by a Mig sent to intercept, and a DHL Express flight out of Baghdad which was hit by a short range surface-to-air missile.
The former was in 1983, when the Cold War was still rather warm, and technology wasn't anything like it is today - transponders & RF comms are dramatically better (in 1983 the Russian air force attempted to contact the Korean jet, on UHF military frequencies); the situation was further complicated by the Russian military being as under-resourced as they were over-paranoid, meaning that the Mig's cannon was missing the tracer rounds which should've been loaded, so the warning shots fired were invisible. Actually, a simple mistake of airmanship began the chain of events (the aircrew left the autopilot in heading-hold mode when it would normally have been switched to nav to follow the flight management computer's pre-programmed (safe) flightpath shortly after departure. A similar mistake isn't impossible, but it'd be MUCH harder to make these days; not least because the skies are vastly more crowded and generally far better monitored, but also because a modern airliner's systems are far more integrated - and it's made far clearer to the crew what the aircraft is doing at any given moment.
The DHL flight was very much in the wrong place at the wrong time; it wasn't long into its climb, and was indiscriminately targeted by a group on the ground who were determined to shoot at something. The crew managed to turn the aircraft around and laded safely (pretty much text book, actually) at Baghdad with no casualties.
Of the handful of other incidents, the most telling is perhaps Iran Air 655 - that one was shot down by a shiny new Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruiser of the US Navy. As is ALWAYS the case with aircraft incidents, there's a long chain of unlikely events in the story leading up to that one, but it can be boiled down ultimately to the crew of the missile ship getting twitchy; so one might argue that it's not safe to fly anywhere which is in range of anyone's ordnance. Again though, technology to identify friend-or-foe has vastly improved since then, and lessons of the human element were learned, I think it's fair to say. It's THE case study for modern (western) militaries.
MH17 was hopelessly unlucky - there's been suggestion that a possible reason for its being fired upon was partially due to a similarity between Malaysian's livery and that of an Ilyushin 96 used as diplomatic transport for Putin (& co.) - the full report isn't yet out, and I doubt it'll ever be able to confirm or refute that with 100% accuracy, but setting that aside the fact is that it might just as easily have been one of countless other aircraft that day.
Practically anything said about MH370 is speculation and only that; educated speculation at very best. We may never find out what happened to that one; certainly its transponder being disabled is a potential indicator of something highly irregular taking place aboard the flight - though it could feasibly have been an innocent failure, either unrecoverable or even (though the chance is even smaller) un-noticed (Helios 522 crashed in Greece due to the flight crew being incapacited by extreme hypoxia as the fueselage wasn't correctly pressurised). The press are periodically making a noise about the hope of one day finding MH370's CVR & FDR; but even if we say for certain that they are (and usable), you'll not find a credible invesigator on the planet who would promise you they'll reveal anything - their operation can be interrupted by failures before an aircraft is lost, and if the transponder was deliberately disabled, I'd expect whomever did it pulled the circuit breakers for the recorders too.
The truth is that for a large carrier with a volume of traffic as heavy as Malaysian's, they've got a pretty good safety record; and I don't think they're any less safe than any other carrier. As has already been said above, there's more chance of nipping over the road for a paper ending in tragedy.
I wouldn't have any problem flying Malaysian. Ryanair on the other hand...
Sorry to have droned on, but [civil] aviation is something I've followed closely for years, and I'm no longer surprised by the pretty reckless speculation & scare-mongering the mainstream media subjects it to at the first sign of any trouble.
Rob
(A frustrated would-be A330 captain)
