MOSCOW (Sputnik), Tommy Yang - In light of the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, a family member of one of the passengers on board the airplane shared with Sputnik how one of the most mysterious accidents in aviation history has affected her life and why many family members continued to struggle to find closure.
Torture of Not Knowing
Grace Nathan was preparing to take her final exams to complete her studies at the University of West England in Bristol, the United Kingdom, when she suddenly got a phone call from her father in March 2014.
"I had just come back from the library. I received a call from my dad's number. I thought my mom had arrived in Beijing and she was calling me to let me know that she had arrived. But my dad was the one on the phone and he didn't even say hello. He just said: 'When is your next exam?' And I remember telling him that my next exam was on Monday. And he just hung up. I felt like I knew something was wrong, because he sound sounded different and he sounded like he was very concerned or worried. And I never heard him sounding like that before. My first thought was: 'something must have happened,'" Nathan, 35, told Sputnik.
Nathan's family is from Malaysia and her father happened to be working in the aviation industry at an office in Beijing at the time. Nathan's mother was supposed to visit her father for a short one-week family reunion when she boarded the flight MH370 on March 8, 2014.
"He called me again after maybe 10 or 15 minutes. And he said: 'Get on the next flight and come home.' I asked him: 'What's going on?' And he said: 'Don't ask me any questions and do what I tell you to do,'" Nathan said.
But when Nathan couldn't book a flight that would depart within 24 hours online and she had to go to the airport to buy a ticket, she called her father again to find out what was happening that required her to return home as soon as she could.
"I called to ask him again. I called him several times and he didn't pick up. And when he finally picked up, I told him: 'You have to tell me what's going on, because I can't buy a ticket online. I have to go to the airport.' He said: 'Something happened to the plane your mother is on. Just come back.' And that's it," she said.
As Nathan was living in Bristol at the time, she had to take a bus from Bristol to the airport in London. On her bus ride, the news about her mother's flight started to trickle in.
"I remember, on the bus journey to London, I was refreshing my Google News feed. And there was so much information out there. Of course, none of it was verified. But it was very toxic. There were a lot of gruesome photos. There were photos of dead people floating in the ocean after an apparent plane crash. There were a lot of very disturbing images. I didn't know what to think and what to feel. At the time, we didn't really know what happened or whether the plane made an emergency landing somewhere," she said.
Despite all the rumors about the fate of the plane, Nathan still remembered the torturous feeling of not knowing what happened when she was on the flight back to Malaysia.
"When I reached the airport and got on the flight, it was a 14 hours direct flight. I didn't have any access to the internet. And I remember being extremely stressed. It was like the one of the worst 14 hours of my life because I just didn't know what was happening and what to expect, because a lot can happen and 14 hours is a long time," she said.
Unfortunately, for Nathan's family and other family members of the 227 passengers and 12 crew members aboard MH370, not knowing what happened to the plane would become an excruciating mystery that would last for the next 10 years.
Unresolved Mystery
After losing contact with the plane when it was flying over the South China Sea on its way to Beijing, the initial search and rescue efforts for MH370 focused on that area in the first few hours.
However, unlike other aviation disasters where the plane's debris field was located shortly afterwards, MH370 was nowhere to be found in the South China Sea.
When Malaysian officials confirmed widely circulated speculations that military radars indicated that MH370 flew away from its planned flight path and made an unexpected turn back towards Malaysia, the revelation drove the public's interests in the plane's fate into new heights.
All kinds of conspiracy theories began to circulate on social media and a new theory trying to explain the plane's disappearance appeared almost every minute.
In the following weeks, Malaysian authorities announced that the plane appeared to have continued to fly for several hours after losing contact with air traffic control in the early hours on March 8, 2014. According to pings received from satellite communication systems, experts offered two possible flight paths for MH370 either to the north towards Kazakhstan or to "a southern corridor" towards the southern Indian Ocean.
As no airplane resembling MH370 had landed in Kazakhstan or any of the neighboring countries on the possible northern flight path, the research and rescue efforts began to focus on the southern flight path that would lead the plane to complete its journey in the southern Indian Ocean.
Australia began to take an active role in the search for MH370 in the Southern Indian Ocean, after the country dispatched a number of naval vessels in the search and rescue missions.
Unfortunately, naval vessels from Australia were unable to locate MH370 according to the possible flight path for the plane based on satellite communication data.
As the depth of the part of the Southern Indian Ocean on MH370’s possible flight path could go as deep as 6,000 meters (3.7 miles), the subsequent search for the missing airplane began to focus on deploying vehicles capable of deep underwater detection.
However, the deep underwater search efforts in the next few years also failed to locate MH370, making it the most mysterious accident that remained unresolved in aviation history.
Mom Not in Past Tense
For family members of those aboard MH370, not knowing exactly what happened to their loved ones became a huge mental burden that would haunt them for the next ten years.
Similar to many other family members who refused to accept the official conclusion from the investigation team from Malaysia that said the plane ended its journey in the southern Indian Ocean, Nathan also struggled with what to believe.
"It was the most horrible feeling in the world to sit there and hear the story change like 10 times in a day. Every day, there was a different narrative. And then the Prime Minister [of Malaysia] decided to prematurely at that stage, like suddenly out of the blue, to announce on national television that they believe the plane had ended its flight somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. For the first two years, I completely could not accept that the plane might have crashed, because there was no physical evidence," Nathan said.
Gradually, in the following years, a number of debris that appeared to be parts of an airplane washed ashore on the coasts of African countries on the west of the southern Indian Ocean. Malaysian authorities, with assistance from the plane's manufacturer, Boeing, confirmed that several pieces of the debris came from MH370.
Nevertheless, many other family members challenged whether those pieces of debris were indeed part of MH370. Some of those family members appeared to continue to hold such views in a documentary focusing on the disappearance of MH370 released on Netflix in 2023.
Even for Nathan, she would only describe herself as partially accepting the official conclusion on the fate of MH370 from Malaysian authorities.
"I would say I have had some partial acceptance, but not full acceptance. I am in a state of partial acceptance, which is something that is very difficult to put into words. It's very difficult to articulate, but I can see it in my actions. For example, logically, I may have accepted that the plane may have ended its flight in the southern Indian Ocean. But I not speak about my mother in the past tense. I still speak about my mother in the present tense. And I'm unable to say that she's no longer with me or something has happened to her. I've never been able to say that to someone," she said.
Nathan said she understood why family members of other passengers or crew members may continue to struggle to accept the official conclusion.
"We believe that everybody grieves differently. Grief is a journey. It's not the same for everyone. It's different for everybody. Everybody's just in a different part of that journey. And I choose to respect that because it's not my place to tell someone else how they should feel," she said.
Nevertheless, Nathan still strongly believed that the family members of MH370 passengers and crew members should unite and help each other. That's why she became an active organizer of a group representing MH370 family members.
Members of the group stay in touch through social media platforms and hold a remembrance event each year for MH370.
"It's not really like a formal organization. It's just basically like a group of family members. And we call ourselves Voice370. And we do organize a remembrance event every year. It's mostly organized by me and my dad, with the participation of some other next of kin. We use it as a platform to remind the world that MH370 is still missing," she said.
The remembrance event for the 10th anniversary since the disappearance of MH370 was held in Malaysia on Sunday, March 3.
Red Flag in Relationship
Despite the enormous mental stress of not knowing the fate of the plane her mother was traveling in, Nathan returned to Bristol by the end of March 2014 to try to complete her studies.
"Once I went back to the UK, and I had to focus on my exams. I had to limit how much I was reading because it was affecting me too much and I couldn't focus on my studies and my exams. I tried not to be too engrossed in all of the news. It was only after I completed all my exams that I became a bit more involved in all of the stuff of organizing family members," she said.
After completing her studies in the UK, Nathan returned to Malaysia and began to work as a lawyer.
But her active role in leading and organizing the group of MH370 family members also had some adverse effect on her personal life.
"I think it was like a red flag to many people because they thought that I was too involved and I was not able to move on. I was not able to let go of my mom and move on. And people thought it could be a problem in a relationship or in a friendship. I also had the same kind of problem at my job. Maybe I'm just tired one day. But somebody might look at me and say: 'Oh, I think she's depressed because she's thinking about her mom again.' People would just assume that everything was related to MH370 because I was always very involved in the 'search on' campaign," she said.
Fortunately, Nathan met someone who could look past all of that in 2018.
"I met my partner at the end of 2018. He accepted and tried to understand me, despite my emotional state I was in or despite the fact that I was fighting this cause [for MH370]. That was something a lot of people did not want to accept about me," she said.
Nathan got married to her partner in 2020 and the young couple have two beautiful children today.
As a young mother, Nathan said she would try to explain to her children about what happened to their grandma.
"My children are too young now. They can't speak yet. But I don't plan on keeping it from them. There's no reason to keep it from them," she said.
Nevertheless, Nathan stressed that she hoped that the search for MH370 would continue, as family members of MH370 passengers and crew members would only find some closure when the airplane is found.