A month since the mysterious disappearance of flight 370, 48-year-old school teacher Sarah Bajc continues to spend a lot of her time monitoring news updates about the missing airliner which vanished on March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Bajc’s boyfriend Philip Wood – a 50-year-old American executive – was among the 239 people aboard the missing aircraft. They had been together for more than two years.
With no debris of the plane being found after a month-long search, she is convinced now more than ever that the flight did not crash. But at this point, Bajc says she doesn’t know what to feel anymore.
The focus of the search has changed repeatedly since air traffic controllers lost contact with the jetliner between Malaysia and Vietnam. It began in the South China Sea, then shifted towards the Strait of Malacca to the West. The search eventually found its way to the southern Indian Ocean, based on extremely limited satellite data combined with radar data taken some five hours before the plane is believed to have gone down.
On Sunday, Angus Houston, the head of the multinational search being conducted off Australia, said that three separate but fleeting sounds from deep in the Indian Ocean were reported- twice by the Chinese patrol vessel Haixun 01 and once by Australian navy’s Ocean Shield.
While he called these reports as “important and encouraging lead”, he stressed that that the signals had not been verified as being linked to Flight 370.
The key to locating the black box could lie with finding debris related to the airliner, so that experts can track back the ocean currents and find the original location of the wreckage and the black box.
Charitha Pattiaratchi, an expert in ocean currents, said the longer it takes to find the debris, the harder it will be to work out the location of the black box.
After Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced on March 24th that “Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean” relatives of the missing, particularly those of some of the 153 Chinese passengers, lashed out at Malaysian authorities for effectively declaring their loved ones to be dead without any firm proof.
Paul Chin, a Chinese psychologist who has helped around 30 families, says most of the families are still in a state of denial, unable to come to terms with the reality of never seeing their loved ones come back.
For Sarah, her biggest concern is that the authorities continue to make every effort to find the aircraft.
“I think the scariest thing I can think of is that there is never closure,” she says. “If they just stay missing forever, that will be impossible to de deal with.”
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