Nearly three years after twin disasters took Malaysia Airlines to the brink of financial collapse, its new chief executive says the company's recovery is going better than expected.
The search for the airline's Flight 370 that went missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board was suspended on 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 the disaster on Tuesday at an industry gathering in Hong Kong.
"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 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 was 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 were carrying more passengers, including on its London route, he said.
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 $US1.7 billion ($A2.3 billion) in losses since 2011.
Bellew's predecessor Cristoph Mueller, who left the job unexpectedly early in June, described the airline as a "ship that has many leaks".
Updates on the finances of the airline are scant: it was delisted from the stock exchange in 2014 and radically restructured with six billion ringgit ($US1.5 billion) in government support.
But lower jet fuel prices have since helped cut costs, and revenue has improved thanks to strong traffic growth in the region.
Bellew said a sales and marketing blitz helped bring back customers. So did revamping inflight menus and bringing in lie-flat business class seats for the A380s.
The airline's load factor, an indicator of how many seats are sold, averaged 82 per cent in the most recent quarter and rose to 90 per cent in December, Bellew said.
Airlines with a load factor higher than 80 per cent are generally profitable, analysts say.
