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Families of Flight 370 Victims Fear Silence as World Moves On
3/3/2015
PARIS — Most of the time, Mr Ghyslain Wattrelos believes that his wife and two of his three children are dead.
But that is pretty much all he believes of what the authorities in eight countries have said about the Malaysian plane that carried his family and disappeared a year ago as if swallowed whole by the earth.
A French engineer and senior business executive, Mr. Wattrelos has no physical proof of their death, with 236 others on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing last march.
No bodies, not even a trace of debris from the plane. He does not know where they died or how: Laurence, his wife of 24 years; his son Hadrien, who would have turned 18 last month, and his daughter, Ambre, barely a teenager, whose last text message to a friend before boarding the plane was “Soon I will see my papa again.”
For a long time, he had held on to those words, willing them to still come true. They could have crash-landed, he hoped, on one of about 16,000 uninhabited islands in Indonesia. They could be hostages somewhere. Nothing seemed more outlandish than a Boeing 777’s simply vanishing in the 21st century.
The tale of Flight 370 is the greatest unsolved mystery in aviation since Amelia Earhart disappeared with her Lockheed Electra in 1937.
Investigators say they have pieced together a flight path that has the jetliner suddenly veering off its China-bound northward trajectory and doubling back over Malaysia before heading south. That presumed path has resulted in a 23,000-square-mile primary search area about 1,000 miles west of Perth, Australia. But even if it were to prove broadly accurate, it would leave open the question of why the plane found itself on such a spectacular diversion.
Like the families of the other victims, most of whom were Chinese or Malaysian, Mr. Wattrelos has spent the last year suspended in a limbo of acceptance, grief, anger and hope fanned by a lack of answers. Distressed by the shrillness of the early media attention, when cameras besieged his home and the faces of his wife, son and daughter would haunt him from television screens and magazine covers, he now speaks of something that to him is far worse: silence.
“The world has moved on,” Mr. Wattrelos said in a recent interview. “But I can’t. Not until I know what happened.”
When the status of Flight 370 changed from “delayed” to “missing” on flight-tracking sites in the early afternoon of March 8, 2014, Mr. Wattrelos was 28,000 feet in the air. He was on a flight from Paris to Beijing to meet his family for the second half of their vacation. They had been living in Beijing for six years and were about to move back to France.
His plane landed nine hours after Flight 370 was scheduled to arrive. When he turned on his cellphone, a text message from a colleague appeared on his screen: “I am so terribly sorry about your family.”
At the gate, a hostess was waiting for him. She took him to a private room with the French consul, an acquaintance from years of working in China. The consul grabbed his shoulders. “The plane is missing,” he said. “Your family has died,” using the French word “disparu.”
It had never occurred to him what an irony it was that in French, the word for “disappeared” and “dead” is the same. But in those early hours there was no ambiguity. He had to call his oldest son, who had stayed behind, studying in Paris. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
Hope came later, when no physical evidence of a crash emerged and officials got tangled in contradictory statements.
Mr. Wattrelos remembers them all.
On March 11, the chief of Malaysia’s air force, Tan Sri Rodzali Daud, was reported as saying that the plane had last been detected way off its route in the Malacca Strait. Later that day, Mr. Daud denied he had ever said such a thing. For days, the search focused on the South China Sea, thousands of miles north of today’s primary search area.
On March 15, the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, suggested that someone on board had deliberately turned off the communication systems.
Nine days later, Malaysia Airlines texted the victims’ families, stating “beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived.”
At the memorial service Mr. Wattrelos organized at the French Embassy in Beijing, the school friends of his children spoke about them in the present tense. And when the day came, in May, that he had to pack up the family home and move to France, his son pleaded with him to bring back all his siblings’ toys and clothes.
What will they think if they come back and we have thrown away all their stuff, his son asked.
But Mr. Wattrelos refused. “I did not want to build a shrine,” he said.
Instead he wanted to put up gravestones in the local cemetery, a place to feel close to his family and grieve with his son. But when he called, he was told he could not have a headstone without a death certificate.
He still gets letters and emails from people telling him his family is alive. Some say the plane’s geographic coordinates came to them in a dream. Others, engineers or retired pilots, send dozens of pages of conjecture of what might have happened. Others again have themselves suffered catastrophic grief and simply offer their support. He has been told his wife and children were prisoners in Afghanistan or Diego Garcia, the American military base in the Indian Ocean.
Sometimes, he said, his heart jumps when the phone rings. A small part of him still wants to believe that they are held hostage, “somewhere,” he says.
Officials at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau leading the search say they are confident that the wreckage will be found by May, when the primary search area will have been combed by underwater drones.
To Mr. Wattrelos such pronouncements, after a year of uncertainty, are meaningless.
In January, the Malaysian government announced that the plane’s disappearance was officially considered an “accident.” Mr. Wattrelos received an email from the authorities telling him he could now apply for death certificates and compensation.
“How dare they say it was an accident, just like that?” he said.
“They would not be offering us death certificates if they didn’t know that my wife and children are dead,” he said. “That’s the part I believe. But if they know that much, what else do they know? And why aren’t they telling us?”
Together with an American teacher, Sarah Bajc, whose partner was on the plane, and a handful of other family members of victims, Mr. Wattrelos wants to motivate a whistle-blower to speak up. Last year, they made a video and raised just over $100,000, which was quickly spent on private investigators. They want to try again. “If we offer a million, maybe someone will speak up,” he said.
He does not have a single theory of what happened. Was it an attempted terrorist attack? A military exercise that accidentally brought down the plane? Did the Western authorities externally take control of the plane and force it to land in the water because someone or something dangerous was believed to be on board?
Whatever happened, Mr. Wattrelos said, “someone somewhere knows something.”
“It’s too big,” he said. “There are too many countries involved, and I hope someone comes forward.”
When he is not peering over oceanic maps and emailing with Ms. Bajc about the next step in their campaign, Mr. Wattrelos tries to live a normal life, for his son’s sake. Before returning to work last spring, he had called his human resources department and requested that no one talk to him about his loss.
“That was very helpful,” he said.
News.
Thank you for reading.
~Wassalam.
greeting.
Families of Flight 370 Victims Fear Silence as World Moves On
3/3/2015
PARIS — Most of the time, Mr Ghyslain Wattrelos believes that his wife and two of his three children are dead.
But that is pretty much all he believes of what the authorities in eight countries have said about the Malaysian plane that carried his family and disappeared a year ago as if swallowed whole by the earth.
A French engineer and senior business executive, Mr. Wattrelos has no physical proof of their death, with 236 others on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing last march.
No bodies, not even a trace of debris from the plane. He does not know where they died or how: Laurence, his wife of 24 years; his son Hadrien, who would have turned 18 last month, and his daughter, Ambre, barely a teenager, whose last text message to a friend before boarding the plane was “Soon I will see my papa again.”
For a long time, he had held on to those words, willing them to still come true. They could have crash-landed, he hoped, on one of about 16,000 uninhabited islands in Indonesia. They could be hostages somewhere. Nothing seemed more outlandish than a Boeing 777’s simply vanishing in the 21st century.
The tale of Flight 370 is the greatest unsolved mystery in aviation since Amelia Earhart disappeared with her Lockheed Electra in 1937.
Investigators say they have pieced together a flight path that has the jetliner suddenly veering off its China-bound northward trajectory and doubling back over Malaysia before heading south. That presumed path has resulted in a 23,000-square-mile primary search area about 1,000 miles west of Perth, Australia. But even if it were to prove broadly accurate, it would leave open the question of why the plane found itself on such a spectacular diversion.
Like the families of the other victims, most of whom were Chinese or Malaysian, Mr. Wattrelos has spent the last year suspended in a limbo of acceptance, grief, anger and hope fanned by a lack of answers. Distressed by the shrillness of the early media attention, when cameras besieged his home and the faces of his wife, son and daughter would haunt him from television screens and magazine covers, he now speaks of something that to him is far worse: silence.
“The world has moved on,” Mr. Wattrelos said in a recent interview. “But I can’t. Not until I know what happened.”
When the status of Flight 370 changed from “delayed” to “missing” on flight-tracking sites in the early afternoon of March 8, 2014, Mr. Wattrelos was 28,000 feet in the air. He was on a flight from Paris to Beijing to meet his family for the second half of their vacation. They had been living in Beijing for six years and were about to move back to France.
His plane landed nine hours after Flight 370 was scheduled to arrive. When he turned on his cellphone, a text message from a colleague appeared on his screen: “I am so terribly sorry about your family.”
At the gate, a hostess was waiting for him. She took him to a private room with the French consul, an acquaintance from years of working in China. The consul grabbed his shoulders. “The plane is missing,” he said. “Your family has died,” using the French word “disparu.”
It had never occurred to him what an irony it was that in French, the word for “disappeared” and “dead” is the same. But in those early hours there was no ambiguity. He had to call his oldest son, who had stayed behind, studying in Paris. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
Hope came later, when no physical evidence of a crash emerged and officials got tangled in contradictory statements.
Mr. Wattrelos remembers them all.
On March 11, the chief of Malaysia’s air force, Tan Sri Rodzali Daud, was reported as saying that the plane had last been detected way off its route in the Malacca Strait. Later that day, Mr. Daud denied he had ever said such a thing. For days, the search focused on the South China Sea, thousands of miles north of today’s primary search area.
On March 15, the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, suggested that someone on board had deliberately turned off the communication systems.
Nine days later, Malaysia Airlines texted the victims’ families, stating “beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived.”
At the memorial service Mr. Wattrelos organized at the French Embassy in Beijing, the school friends of his children spoke about them in the present tense. And when the day came, in May, that he had to pack up the family home and move to France, his son pleaded with him to bring back all his siblings’ toys and clothes.
What will they think if they come back and we have thrown away all their stuff, his son asked.
But Mr. Wattrelos refused. “I did not want to build a shrine,” he said.
Instead he wanted to put up gravestones in the local cemetery, a place to feel close to his family and grieve with his son. But when he called, he was told he could not have a headstone without a death certificate.
He still gets letters and emails from people telling him his family is alive. Some say the plane’s geographic coordinates came to them in a dream. Others, engineers or retired pilots, send dozens of pages of conjecture of what might have happened. Others again have themselves suffered catastrophic grief and simply offer their support. He has been told his wife and children were prisoners in Afghanistan or Diego Garcia, the American military base in the Indian Ocean.
Sometimes, he said, his heart jumps when the phone rings. A small part of him still wants to believe that they are held hostage, “somewhere,” he says.
Officials at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau leading the search say they are confident that the wreckage will be found by May, when the primary search area will have been combed by underwater drones.
To Mr. Wattrelos such pronouncements, after a year of uncertainty, are meaningless.
In January, the Malaysian government announced that the plane’s disappearance was officially considered an “accident.” Mr. Wattrelos received an email from the authorities telling him he could now apply for death certificates and compensation.
“How dare they say it was an accident, just like that?” he said.
“They would not be offering us death certificates if they didn’t know that my wife and children are dead,” he said. “That’s the part I believe. But if they know that much, what else do they know? And why aren’t they telling us?”
Together with an American teacher, Sarah Bajc, whose partner was on the plane, and a handful of other family members of victims, Mr. Wattrelos wants to motivate a whistle-blower to speak up. Last year, they made a video and raised just over $100,000, which was quickly spent on private investigators. They want to try again. “If we offer a million, maybe someone will speak up,” he said.
He does not have a single theory of what happened. Was it an attempted terrorist attack? A military exercise that accidentally brought down the plane? Did the Western authorities externally take control of the plane and force it to land in the water because someone or something dangerous was believed to be on board?
Whatever happened, Mr. Wattrelos said, “someone somewhere knows something.”
“It’s too big,” he said. “There are too many countries involved, and I hope someone comes forward.”
When he is not peering over oceanic maps and emailing with Ms. Bajc about the next step in their campaign, Mr. Wattrelos tries to live a normal life, for his son’s sake. Before returning to work last spring, he had called his human resources department and requested that no one talk to him about his loss.
“That was very helpful,” he said.
News.
Thank you for reading.
~Wassalam.
