GHYSLAIN WATTRELOS has spent 12 months trying to adapt to his empty Parisian home. A year ago today, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared, and he went from being head of a bustling family of five, to a family of two: his wife Laurence and two teenage children, Adrien, 17, and Ambre, 13, were on board.
“It means suddenly you are alone in a big house,” he says softly, in his first British interview since the disappearance. His 20-year-old remaining son is a student, living away. “It’s very strange.”
Mr Wattrelos is remarkably composed for someone at the centre of the world’s biggest aviation mystery.
But the trauma of experiencing such a loss is not far below his professional exterior.
It doesn’t help that one year on, more questions than and months, reports about everything from what direction the plane had flown in, to the time of its last contact with the ground, were hugely contradictory. The official theory, based on analysis of satellite signals, eventually decided the plane veered south, ran out of fuel and crashed around 1,000 miles west of Australia.
Data has pointed to a 23,000 square mile area of seabed, which is where the epic £61.5million search has focused. The Australian Transport Safety Board has until May when weather conditions will force the operation to take a pause. Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan has said he expects to find some trace of wreckage before then.
Few of the families are convinced. Mr Wattrelos believes that governments, including Malaysia, America, Australia and his own in France, are covering something up.
He recently placed his hopes in an independent investigator with secret service “connections” to shine a light on this shady post-MH370 world. He was approached at the end of last year, and is reluctant to divulge details, other than the fact this man is “very connected to secret services.”
There is another private investigator working on behalf of five relatives including Mr Wattrelos and Sarah Bajc, the American partner of passenger Philip Wood. They managed to raise more than £100,000 online, but that hasn’t stretched very far.
For Ms Bajc, only an independent investigation run by a country not involved in the current inquiry would satisfy her suspicions about a coverup. “Of course that will never happen,” she says.
Her distress is palpable from the emails written in capital letters from her home in Kuala Lumpur. She calls the current search effort a “sham” and says the Malaysian government is guilty of “constant flip flops, contradictions and atrocious public treatment of the next of kin”.
“There is a giant hole where Philip used to be: in my daily life, in my heart and in my future,” she says. She had packed up her flat to move, and Mr Wood was flying to Beijing to help her with the move when he disappeared.
“It isn’t a hole that can heal as part of a normal grieving process, because there is still no proof as to what happened, or even if he is dead.”
There was outrage among the families when in January, Malaysia officially declared the plane’s disappearance an accident. “All the experts are saying it’s not an accident, so this is something that I cannot accept. How can they say that?” said Mr Wattrelos.
Adrien would have turned 18 a few weeks ago. His father’s initial distress at his disappearance has turned into anger and a dogged determination to find out the truth.
“I want my government to do something … Their silence means something. I will spend whatever time and money that’s needed to find it.”