By Ernest Bower

Southeast Asia’s bounding economic growth is outstripping governments’ response and creating yawning safety gaps that must be addressed immediately. The gut-wrenching news that Air Asia flight QZ8501 (QZ8501) from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore has gone missing today underlines the point. Coupled with the extended tragedy of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 (MH370), in which the aircraft, passengers, and crew remain unfound, this event should cause outrage and a demand for immediate action.

ASEAN’s growing middle class and private sector leaders, along with tourists, business visitors, and expats should be pushing the region’s governments to immediately upgrade and invest in the necessary infrastructure, both physical and regulatory, to protect fliers.

ASEAN’s leaders described a vision for a Single Aviation Market in the ASEAN Charter in 2007. The goal was to create an effective ASEAN Open Skies regime by 2015. However, despite the fact that Asia-Pacific air travel is estimated by regional bodies to more than triple by 2030, ASEAN’s governments have not been able to coordinate safety regimes or put modern safety controls in place to ensure the best possible security for the fast growing number of air travelers.

Individual countries are doing their part to take advantage of the growth. For instance, Singapore is adding two additional terminals (for a total of five) to region-leading Changi International Airport with plans to be able to accommodate nearly 140 million passengers a year by 2025. Indonesia’s Garuda and Lion airlines are buying new planes at a rate which will see them become larger than Singapore Airlines, ASEAN’s leading full-service carrier, in 2015. Budget airlines such as Air Asia now account for over 50 percent of all air traffic in ASEAN’s largest domestic markets.

The opportunity for growth is real. Mott MacDonald, an Australian company specializing in technical assessments, estimated in a study for Indonesia’s aviation regulators that ASEAN Open Skies would result in an additional $2.7 billion in direct gross domestic product and over 16,000 new direct jobs. Indonesia alone is home to almost half of ASEAN’s 640 million people.

But even as businesses and governments invest in growth, regulatory infrastructure is lagging behind. That fact opens large and dangerous gaps in the air transportation safety region.

While we hope that the crew and passengers of QZ8501 will be located and found alive, we should also be initiating campaigns to ask ASEAN’s governments to fully implement Open Skies immediately and comprehensively in 2015. This means the effort should include a deep and through integration of sovereign safety regimes and new rules to modernize security regimes, including updating countries’ air and maritime domain awareness regimes and requiring all airlines to include world-class tracking devices with redundant systems on all aircraft.

Mr. Ernest Z. Bower is a senior adviser and holds the Sumitro Chair for Southeast Asia Studies at CSIS.