Cold-case file awaits as search suspended

For Flight 370, questions likely to remain open

BANGKOK—For two years and more, it has been a lost ship, a metal container carrying 239 souls that simply disappeared one late Asian night never to be seen again. And now, the search for the remains of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 likely will become a thing of memory, too.

With Friday’s announcement that the meticulous ocean search for the missing jetliner will be suspended—in effect, called off—one of this decade’s most tantalizing unanswered questions is headed toward becoming, in effect, a cold case.

“I am not surprised it’s coming to an end without any answers,” Tony Wong, a businessman in Kuala Lumpur, said Monday.

“People are slowly forgetting the incident,” he said. “No one will ever know the truth.”

The truth may be out there. The problem is, you have to know where to look. And that’s been precisely the problem all along.

The Boeing 777-200ER vanished on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Investigators believed it turned back west and then south before dropping into the Indian Ocean west of Australia, where the search has been concentrated. The Malaysian government has concluded that it was deliberately steered off course. Conspiracy theories, unsurprisingly, still abound in the vacuum of facts: Was it blown up? Steered into the sea? Diverted to a remote airstrip somewhere? Abducted by aliens?

For a long stretch, it seemed thIn China, relatives have roundly denounced the decision. They still don’t seem ready to think about the finality of it all.

“They are actually just playing with words,” Hu Xiulan, the mother of a Flight 370 passenger, said Monday.