BANGKOK — On Sunday, the world is a year into the mystifying disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Despite the exhaustive search for the plane, which disappeared March 8, 2014, during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, no trace of the jet has been found. In late January, Malaysia’s government formally declared the incident an accident and said all 239 people on board were presumed dead.
Searches of vast swaths of the Indian Ocean continue, pegged to a cocktail of science and optimism that many hope will provide some answers for the families.
“There is really no precedent to this,” said Geoffrey Thomas, the Australia-based editor in chief and managing director of .
Part of it is the expectations that humans have about how stories end, fed by a media that thrives on tidy resolutions.
“We expect a resolution soon. And a year is not soon,” said Emily Godbey, an associate professor at Iowa State University who studies and writes about how humans respond to disasters.
“How can they not find such a big airplane?” Song Chunjie, whose sister was on the plane, said in China shortly after the debris of another aircraft, AirAsia Flight 8501, was spotted in Indonesia’s Java Sea in early January. “Knowing the bad news is painful, but it’s even more painful for us to live with uncertainty and have to wait to know what actually happened.”
If the massive undersea search turns up nothing by the end of May, the three countries leading the effort — Australia, Malaysia and China — will go “back to the drawing board,” Malaysia’s transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, said Saturday.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Thursday, “I can’t promise that the search will go on at this intensity forever,” but added that “we will continue our very best efforts to resolve this mystery and provide some answers.”
