One year ago, on March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight 370 vanished in thin air. The Boeing 777 was making its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and was carrying 239 people. Since then, a multinational effort has been undertaken in an effort to find the missing plane and passengers, but to no avail. In all, the search has covered 1.8 million square miles, and has involved 82 aircraft and 84 ships from 26 different countries.
The massive search effort has yielded no results; no wreckage, nor life jackets, nor flotation devices, nor luggage, nor human remains. Despite this, Malaysia’s civil aviation authority officially declared in January the passengers and crew members from flight 370 deceased. They also officially classified the disappearance “an accident.”
A group called Voice370, which speaks on behalf of the victims’ families, rejects the finding, and released a statement on Friday saying,
“Despite this complete lack of wreckage found or physical evidence of a catastrophic event, the Malaysian government has officially declared that the airplane crashed, leaving no survivors, and it has ended the rescue phase of the search effort…We do not accept this finding and we will not give up hope until we have definitive proof of what happened to MH370.”
A full report on the disappearance was released today, March 8, 2015, but it provides few answers. The only interesting bit of information to come from the report is the revelation that the battery of the locator beacon for the plane’s data recorder had expired more than a year before the plane vanished.
Even still, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott vows to keep the search alive.
“It can’t go on forever, but as long as there are reasonable leads, the search will go on…We’ve got 60,000 square kilometers that is the subject of this search. If that’s unsuccessful, there’s another 60,000 square kilometers that we intend to search and, as I said, we are reasonably confident of finding the plane.”
Australia, who is still leading the search efforts, is helping keep hope alive for the families of the victims. Only time will tell if the plane will ever be found. The families and friends of those who went missing with the plane continue to hold on to hope that survivors will still be found somewhere, somehow. For now, all we are left to do is wonder, still, what could have happened one year ago on flight 370.
