Off the wire
Urgent: China confident to deliver 6-pct foreign trade growth goal: minister  • China Voice: 7 pct growth as a responsible global player  • Abducted 71-year-old American woman released in Nigeria: police  • Moulin Rouge's Doriss Girls celebrates Singapore's 50th anniversary  • Super Dan questions 'strange' draw  • U.S. Justice chief not ruling out dismantling Ferguson police dept  • China on yellow alert for smog  • Roundup: 40,000 passengers languishing, 160 flights affected as Nepal's only airport closed  • Portuguese PM admits failing to pay taxes on time  • Stuttgart, Berlin share spoils in German Bundesliga  
You are here:   Home

Feature: A year on, head of MH370 search remains "positive" about locating missing plane

Xinhua, March 7, 2015 Adjust font size:

Twelve months after the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, the leader of the search effort in the southern Indian Ocean, Martin Dolan, has an unambiguous message for the families of those missing -- "We remain positive about finding the aircraft ... and we're certainly nowhere even near thinking about giving up."

Vigils are being held across the globe marking one year anniversary of MH370 since the Boeing 777, carrying 239 people, lost contact with air traffic controllers on March 8, 2014 en route to Beijing after departing from Kuala Lumpur just 38 minutes earlier.

What has happened to the flight after it vanished from the radar screens remains unknown. Even after 365 days of strenuous search efforts, there have been no remnants of the plane found, no flotsam spotted at sea, nothing at all to indicate where a gleaming modern passenger jet might have pitched into the ocean.

The MH370 search area is now restricted to a narrow band of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Fremantle in Western Australia and Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), is the man charged with leading that needle-in-a- haystack operation.

In an interview with Xinhua marking the one-year anniversary of the plane's disappearance, Dolan conceded the search was becoming "more difficult" as time progressed but said he and his team remained resolute in their determination to find the wreckage, and

finally give some closure to the passengers' grief-stricken families.

Chinese and Malaysian citizens made up the majority of those on board, but families from Australia, France, Iran, Russia and the United States have also been affected by the aircraft's mysterious disappearance.

The multinational passenger list has provided an added layer of complexity and sensitivity to Dolan's job. With every update publicly and globally scrutinized, an already high-pressure situation is made more difficult for the ATSB.

Families of passengers have been frustrated by the lack of evidence in the case, and the apparent lack of progress made by the search teams. The absence of any answers, or any meaningful explanation surrounding the flight's disappearance, has only compounded their sense of grief.

"We're doing our best to explain to all of the families what we are doing, why we are searching the area we are searching and why it's a high priority for our search," Dolan told Xinhua. "But also what is driving us for this search are their expectations.

"In these times where everyone is a bit uncertain, particularly with significant dates like this anniversary, it becomes even more difficult. But the clear message we want the families to have is we are positive about finding the aircraft and focused on doing it and our search continues.

"As far as we can tell, there are some families that feel they' re not getting enough information and some that just want to know there's been results. At the moment, we can't give results, but what we can give is a clear message that we are continuing the work, are totally committed to it and expect there will be a result. We just can't tell them when."

In January, the Malaysian government released a statement declaring that the MH370 tragedy was "an accident" and that all passengers on board were "presumed dead." But with no evidence obtained to support their claims, some families reacted with anger.

"They are lying," said American Sarah Bajic, whose partner was on flight MH370. "It is impossible to bring closure until we have proof."

"Accident with what? It is just an excuse to declare it so they can make an announcement on the deaths," said Malaysian woman Syafinaz Hasnan, whose brother was on board.

Malaysia made the statement through the Department of Civil Aviation and their decision to not speak to each family individually served to upset those affected. "They don't have the guts to announce it right to our face," said Mohammed Sahril Shaai, whose sibling was a passenger..

Dolan said balancing the best interests of families with such a large investigation has been a stressful task.

"The key pressure is the expectation of the families," Dolan said. "There's also a level of attention by the world media and a range of competing theories as to what might have happened.

"So part of this is just continuing the challenge of explaining ourselves. Yes, there are big challenges like relying on complex analysis of limited satellite data, the complexity of rain in the subsea area that we are searching and the sheer scale of our search area, together with the fact we're in the southern Indian Ocean six or seven days (a week) sailing from shore in what are often really bad weather conditions."

"All of those are challenges, but challenges we factored into our planning and execution and we think we are rising to the challenge pretty well. It's tough, but it's a toughness we were expecting."

Dolan believed Air France flight 447, which went missing off the coast of Brazil in June 2009, killing all 228 people on board, is the only event comparable to MH370. Although all passengers were announced dead on the same day the flight went missing, the plane's black boxes weren't recovered for nearly two years.

But MH370's disappearance is more mysterious still, because not one skerrick of evidence has emerged so far to indicate where, why and how the jet vanished, for all intents and purposes, from the face of the earth. Dolan called the case "unprecedented."

"We weren't expecting an event where towards the last seven hours of its flight, an aircraft was not being tracked by any of the conventional technologies -- it's unprecedented," Dolan said.

"We had to contemplate the possibility (that search efforts would last 12 months). The only thing that was comparable was Air France flight 447 in the South Atlantic Ocean, where we knew it had taken our French colleagues two years to find the missing aircraft.

"We always had in mind that it may take that long, we were obviously hoping that we would have found the aircraft by now, but we didn't have a guarantee."

The search area, which initially began in the Gulf of Thailand, moved to the South China Sea and spanned as far as the Andaman Sea, has been narrowed to 1.1 million square kilometers of the Indian Ocean seafloor. It is anticipated that search efforts of the marked area will be completed by May.

During such a lengthy and, so far, fruitless investigation, conspiracy theories will inevitably and unavoidably crop up.

Last week, the CNN's Jeff Wise suggested the Russia government may have hijacked the plane and flown it to Kazakhstan. It's one of a number of theories that Dolan's team simply can't pay attention to during the search.

"We know things for certain," Dolan said defiantly. "And the key thing we know for certain, based on good and very reliable analysis, is the so-called seventh arc, the last connection between the aircraft and the satellite, which will mean the aircraft will be found very close to the southern portion of that arc.

"Anything that comes forward as a theory that doesn't match those facts, we look at and quickly dismiss."

What's not worth dismissing, however, is the tireless commitment of Dolan's teams, whose determination has been unwavering throughout the last 12 months.

It has been reported previously that heartrending letters from families of MH370 passengers have been sent to the ATSB, and served as timely, human reminders of the importance of their mission. A bureau spokesman said in January that the letters "help the crew understand that they are working to find the answers that will mean a great deal to people who have lost loved ones on the flight."

Dolan did want to elaborate on that point, other than to say motivation among his team remained high -- largely because of the grieving families.

"Our crews out in the water in the Indian Ocean are really strongly committed to this search ... and what they're most conscious of is the fact that there are the families of 239 missing people involved," he said.

"They are looking for answers and deserve answers. They're certainly nowhere even near thinking about giving up." Endi