CANBERRA, March 24 -- The deployment of Australian air force liaison officers on Chinese aircraft searching for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is a sensible move that points the way to greater international cooperation, an Australian defence expert said Monday.

Dr John Blaxland, senior fellow of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, dismissed concerns that the deployment poses a security risk to any country.

"A liaison officer is an incredibly sensible thing to do," said Blaxland, adding the search area over the southern Indian Ocean is too dangerous and remote for the different forces to risk communication problems.

"The key thing to avoid is misunderstanding," Blaxland said in an interview with Xinhua in his office.

"We're talking about operating at the utter extremities of their capabilities this is 2,500 km away from any safe landing place this is not where you want to make mistakes or where you want to miscommunicate or you might want to not quite understand a word that you heard over the radio from the neighboring aircraft or from the control tower. This is really serious stuff."

In a "silver lining" to the tragedy, the search for the missing airliner is proving to be immensely beneficial to improving international trust and understanding, especially in terms of emergency response and humanitarian assistance, he said.

The last event of such massive international cooperation was in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

"From the Australian perspective this is seen as a very significant opportunity for Australia to demonstrate its good will to the people of China and to the people of Malaysia and elsewhere about what Australia is doing and why it's doing it and how committed it is to seeing this through," said Blaxland.

"I think it's important also to bear in mind that this is a collaborative effort -- this isn't one country doing this. This is a multiple arrangement where several countries are collaborating bringing the best that they've got to offer to complement the skills and the capabilities of the others to find this needle in a haystack."

The search for the missing aircraft is breaking down barriers between military personnel, which all countries could learn from.

"Quite often countries will form an adverse perspective about another country when they don't know them well and they don't understand what they're thinking. They don't have a chance to collaborate and get to know each other," said Blaxland.

"One of the things that's happened for Australia in its efforts in southeast Asia, as it's sought to collaborate with its neighbors, is the incremental building of trust and mutual understanding. That has happened through these collaborative activities, through joint exercises in the maritime space, in the humanitarian assistance and disaster relief," he said.

"We've found that there's real benefit. It's incremental, but there's genuine and substantive benefit to be gained from collaborating," he said.

"I'm hoping that the powers that be in all of those countries will recognize that and seek to capitalize on it and not see it as a once-off, but see it as the start of something new."