Flight MH370 10 years on: Malaysians unite in grief to remember the 239 on board missing plane
A downpour marked the start of a sombre morning in Kuala Lumpur as Malaysians on Friday marked 10 years since the disappearance of flight MH370 with an outpouring of grief and condolences for the 239 people on board the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines plane.
Flight MH370, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, disappeared in the predawn hours of March 8, 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, leaving relatives bereft and without closure from one of aviation's biggest mysteries.
Most of the passengers were Chinese nationals while the others included dozens of Malaysians, along with victims from Australia, Canada, France, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Russia, Ukraine, the Netherlands and the United States.
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The disappearance stunned Malaysia - and the world - and, over the years, grim memories have been revived as searches have been launched to great fanfare across the Indian Ocean only to fail in the search for concrete evidence of what happened to the jet.
"I remember 10 years ago after 10 hours in the search for MH370, I was still following the updates on my hospital bed ... even as I was getting wheeled into the labour room," said one Aziza Berahim in a post on Facebook on Friday.
"Suddenly my daughter is now 10 years old. It's so sad, I hope the families of the victims will get to the truth about what happened sooner or later."
Families of those on board continue to be haunted by the disappearance, lives lived for a decade in constant uncertainty.
"Now a decade later, I still ask myself the same questions. We still don't know what happened," said Grace Nathan, a Malaysian who organised a memorial for the victims on Sunday and whose 56-year-old mother Anne Daisy was a passenger on the plane.
Air traffic controllers lost contact with the Boeing 777 jetliner not long after it crossed over into Vietnamese airspace.
"Good night, Malaysian three seven zero," was the last message transmitted by the pilots before the plane went missing.
Investigators said it was around then that the plane's transponder - responsible for sending vital location data - was manually switched off.
Satellite tracking - based on seven distinct pings each spread an hour apart and believed to have come from the plane - traced a route that ended in a remote region in the largely uncharted Indian Ocean some 2,000km west of Perth, Australia.
Transport Minister Anthony Loke promised the families of those on the missing plane that Malaysia's government was "steadfast in our resolve to locate MH370" and that "money is no issue" in plans to commission a fresh search by US-based deep-sea survey firm Ocean Infinity.
"And I stand before you and make this promise, that I will do everything possible to gain cabinet's approval to sign a new contract with Ocean Infinity for the search to resume as soon as possible," Loke said at the memorial last Sunday.
Two earlier attempts at finding the plane yielded nothing that could help unravel the mystery of MH370's disappearance.
The first search by an international team led by Australia, and supported by China and Malaysia, was called off in 2017 after workers scoured an area of more than 120,000 sq km around a potential crash site at a cost of A$200 million (US$130.7 million).
Ocean Infinity attempted a second fruitless search in 2018, covering a 112,000 sq km area of the Indian Ocean.
MH370's disappearance triggered a scramble among global aviation regulators to upgrade safety measures.
Most airline operators have adopted enhanced location tracking systems on their planes that send out automatic pings every 15 minutes but the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has had to twice postpone the implementation of a one-minute automatic distress tracking system to January next year.
Investigations into the mystery also brought into stark focus how human error had likely enabled the plane to go missing.
An in-depth report released by Malaysia's transport ministry found that the supervising officer at Kuala Lumpur's air traffic control centre could have been sleeping on the job when they received a call from their counterparts in Ho Chi Minh asking to confirm the plane's location.
International investigators also slammed militaries monitoring areas that MH370 was believed to have passed over for withholding crucial data that could have helped in the search.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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