Frustrated and alarmed by the failure to find any trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 after the 250-ton jet disappeared nine weeks ago, the United Nations’ civil aviation arm will convene a meeting in Montreal on Monday to discuss ways to keep track of planes flying over the open sea.

“We can’t let this happen again,” said Anthony Council, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, an airline industry group.

But the United Nations agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization, has dozens of competing proposals to sort through, and it operates only through multinational consensus, which usually means slowly or not at all. After the last time searchers struggled to find a downed airliner — the crash of Air France Flight 447 into the equatorial Atlantic Ocean five years ago — the agency considered three recommendations from safety authorities, but only one is being carried out: the introduction of longer-lasting batteries for the “pingers” attached to the data recorders, or black boxes.

The requirement that batteries last 90 days instead of 30 will not be fully phased in until 2018, and the Boeing 777 used on the Malaysian flight did not have the new batteries. If they had been installed, it might have helped in the search, which took weeks to narrow its focus enough to begin listening for the pings.

“It’s complicated work to get 191 states to agree on anything,” said Anthony Philbin, a spokesman for the United Nations agency, known as ICAO.

Another expert with long experience in multinational aviation negotiations, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that “ICAO doesn’t feel very good about the aftermath of Air France 447, and then, lo and behold, we get Malaysia.”

“ICAO doesn’t have a very good story to tell,” he said. “Nobody does.”

Like the Malaysian plane, the Air France jet was flying over open ocean, far beyond the range of tracking radar on the ground. But it was not far off course, and searchers had a good idea where to look from the start — they found floating debris from the crash within a few days. By contrast, the Malaysia Airlines jet stopped communicating with the ground and then turned sharply off course, leaving only faint and obscure clues to where it had gone as it flew unrecognized and largely untracked for thousands more miles.

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