Relatives of passengers on a Malaysia Airlines flight that inexplicably vanished ten years ago called for a new search on Sunday, speaking of their anguish and struggle to find closure.
Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers, vanished from radar screens on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Despite the most extensive search in aviation history, the plane has never been discovered.
Approximately 500 relatives and friends gathered Sunday at a shopping mall near Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur for a “remembrance day,” with many clearly affected with sadness.
Some came from China, where nearly two-thirds of the passengers on the crashed jet were from.
Expressions of the relatives of the victims of Malaysian plane crash
“The past ten years have been a constant emotional rollercoaster for me,” Grace Nathan, a 36-year-old Malaysian attorney whose mother, Anne Daisy, 56, was aboard the aircraft, said in an interview.
Speaking to the gathering, she urged the Malaysian government to launch a new search. “MH370 is not history,” she explained.
Liu Shuang Fong, 67, of China’s Hebei province, lost her 28-year-old son Li Yan Lin, who was also on the plane. “I am demanding justice for my son. “Where is the plane?” inquired Liu, who had flown to Malaysia for the occasion. “The search must go on,” she added.
Transport Minister Anthony Loke told reporters, “As far as Malaysia is concerned, it is committed to finding the plane price is not an issue.”
He informed family at the gathering that he planned to meet with representatives from Ocean Infinity, a Texas-based maritime exploration corporation that had previously undertaken an unsuccessful search, to suggest a fresh operation.
“We have been waiting for them to give us suitable dates and I hope to meet them soon”.
Various searchers in this regard
Ocean Infinity’s 2018 hunt came to an end after several months of unsuccessfully combing the seafloor.
A previous Australian-led search of 120,000 square kilometres (46,000 square miles) in the Indian Ocean yielded little evidence of the jet, with only a few pieces of wreckage recovered. The effort, dubbed the largest search in aviation history, was halted in January 2017.
The plane’s disappearance has long been the subject of a slew of speculations, ranging from plausible to absurd, including the possibility that veteran pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah had gone rogue.
A final assessment on the disaster, issued in 2018, referred to air traffic control failures and said that the plane’s trajectory was modified manually.
