In a statement that was broadcast worldwide on Monday, March 24th to a heartbroken audience, and sent in a text message to anxious relatives, Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak said simply “Flight MH370 ended in the Indian Ocean.” The Malaysian Airlines jetliner’s disappearance two weeks earlier spurred a monumental effort to find the downed aircraft, a search that had persevered with full-force until the Prime Minister’s recent statement.
Now, the families of the over 230 passengers on board the plane are left reeling with no fewer questions and nothing to mitigate them but a deceptively soothing final update confirming the termination of the search. They have been told to “accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean,” leaving no survivors.
Malaysian officials are eager to let the case rest, but citizens and officials of other countries are not. A search team launched off the west coast of Australia (where the plane might have crashed) reports two suspicious-looking objects potentially related to the accident. Chinese military pilots confirmed the sighting. And, dissatisfied with the airline company’s results so far (the Beijing-bound plane was understandably carrying a large majority of Chinese citizens), China is calling on Malaysia to “step up [its] efforts.”
Why the plane veered so far off course, why its transmissions failed to reach Malaysia, why it was flying so low (apparently around 12,000 feet), and why the wreck remains frustratingly unreachable are questions that will remain unanswered as individual investigations continue, but the passengers’ families cannot be expected to accept that the plane has, for now at least, disappeared forever. At a time when emerging evidence is continually creating new leads, the families and the lost passengers deserve more than to be shrugged off as an unfinished analysis.
Australia, fortunately, has not given up the case. Ignoring the mission’s costly demands, Prime Minister Warren Truss has vowed to “continue [the search] indefinitely.” Though finding the wreck may only confirm that there were no survivors, this information would, at least, give the families a feeling of closure that silence does not.