Families of passengers still in limbo
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — “Where is Patrick?”
Jacquita Gonzales could hear the urgency in the caller’s voice when asked about her husband. Patrick Gomes was an inflight supervisor for Malaysia Airlines and one of its planes had disappeared. It was Saturday, March 8, 2014.
Almost a year later, it’s a question with no solid answers. Nothing from Flight 370 has been recovered for 352 days, threatening to make it the first commercial jet ever to be lost without a trace. With no debris and no knowledge of what happened, distraught families are struggling for closure.
“There are huge holes, huge gaps in our lives,” said 52-year-old Gonzales, a daycare centre teacher in Kuala Lumpur.
Angered at the search process and the lack of information, families have formed self-help groups on social networks and also meet to talk in person. They yell and cry and debate the many conspiracy theories around Flight 370 — it flew to Afghanistan; it was shot down by China; it caught fire. Mostly, they console each other.
Sarah Bajc, a 49 year-old American teacher, uses her knowledge of Mandarin to bring together Malaysian and Chinese relatives of those who died. She also set up a crowd-funded thirdparty investigation into the disappearance.
She’s still living in the Kuala Lumpur apartment she picked out with Philip Wood, a 51-year-old International Business Machines Corp. executive from Texas. He was on the flight to pack up his home in Beijing before moving to Malaysia.
“I’ve never been to formal counselling, but I’ve stayed grounded through a strong family and dear trusted friends,” Bajc said. “I get through each day by focusing on what I can control. They have treated the investigation like a joke, and have been callous and malicious in their treatment of the families. The world should not accept their incompetent, irresponsible and selfish behaviour.”
After 327 days of hunting for the plane, Malaysia’s civil aviation department on Jan. 29 finally declared Flight 370 an accident and all on board presumed dead. It was to help the families obtain assistance, including compensation. Malaysia’s government has taken the airline private, plans to cut jobs and has appointed a new chief executive to restructure the company.
“We have endeavoured and pursued every credible lead and reviewed all available data,” Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, director general of civil aviation, said in a statement Jan. 29. The information “supports the conclusion that MH370 ended its flight in the southern Indian Ocean.”
Even after a multinational search of 4.6 million square kilometres of the Indian Ocean, or about one per cent of the Earth’s surface area, the world is little closer to finding out what really happened to Flight 370 with 239 people on board. Investigators are still trying to figure out how one of the most sophisticated aircraft of the modern aviation era simply vanished without any trace.
“It’s really on an unprecedented scale. I can’t recall a search that’s been as difficult as this,” Ken Mathews, a former air accident investigator who’s worked with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board as well as its U.K and New Zealand peers, said by phone from Cairns, Australia. “Without anything specific to go on, it’s very difficult.”
The jet with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board, vanished while on a routine commercial flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. The plane was deliberately steered off its course, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak has said.
Boats, armed with sonars capable of spotting objects no bigger than a shoebox, haven’t found a single manmade item across 22,000 square kilometres of siltcovered sea floor — no seat cushion, life-jacket, or any object that usually floats if a plane crashes on sea. The current phase of the investigation is likely to be completed in May, when sonar scanners will have examined an area of about 60,000 square kilometres.
The searches not finding a single body only adds to the pain of those grieving.
Wanting to see the remains is important to achieve closure, according to Wallace Chan Chi-ho, a specialist in bereavement and an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Malaysia’s government pronouncing those on board as dead has only angered the families.
Relatives of Chinese passengers, who made up 153 of those on board, travelled to Kuala Lumpur to seek meetings with Malaysian authorities, according to the Facebook page of MH370 Families, a non-profit organization. Don’t give them “death sentence” without hard evidence, says a Feb. 13 posting.
Others are also taking to social media. Gonzales and families of the nine other cabin crew members share a chat room on messaging service Whatsapp Inc., where she’s nicknamed “boss” in reference to her late husband’s job.
“Sometimes we are up till 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., talking about our families,” she said. Chatting and meeting up with other relatives is a “form of therapy,” she said.
In the 62 years since a De Havilland Comet flight from London to Johannesburg kicked off the modern passenger aviation industry, no scheduled commercial jet has ever disappeared without a trace.
Investigators tracked the aircraft to a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean based on a series of failed connections between the aircraft and an Inmarsat satellite as it flew south before its fuel ran out about 2,500 kilometres southwest of Perth, Australia.
“People say it gets better, but nothing has changed for me when there are no answers,” said Grace Subathirai Nathan, 27, whose mother Anne Catherine Daisy, disappeared on the Malaysian flight.
“What I feel on March 8, I still feel it today,” she said. “I try to carry on with life but I have not moved on in life. Sometimes I find myself crying on the way to work and on the way back.”