The situation of a big airliner with more than 200 people on board not showing up at its destination on time is not, of itself, unusual. But if an aircraft does not show up on time, and the airline cannot tell those waiting at the airport for loved ones when or even if it will arrive, that is highly unusual.
At Beijing’s Capital International Airport on Saturday, 8 March 2014, at the top of the big ‘arrivals’ board all morning, a line of red text read: ‘Flight MH370, from Kuala Lumpur, STA 6:30. Delayed.’
People started gathering below the board – friends and relatives of those waiting for those on MH370 to arrive, journalists who had heard whispers and then shouts the aircraft was missing, and policemen keen, in the Chinese communist way, to keep order.
‘I’m very, very worried now,’ Zhai Le, who was to meet a group of friends off MH370 and then set off on holidays with them, told reporters at the scene.
Some relatives started becoming hysterical when no-one could tell them what was going on. A cameraman was reported punched by one of them.
Chinese authorities don’t like such scenes, and got buses to load up relatives and take them to a hotel about 15 kilometres away, to be out of sight and briefed if and when new information arrived.
Just after 1:00pm, the line of red text saying MH370 was ‘Delayed’ just disappeared without explanation.
It was clear to Malaysian authorities they had to say something official. Late morning, Malaysia Airlines issued a statement saying the aircraft was missing, and that it would hold a news conference soon. Like other major media groups, CNN didn’t wait for the press conference – they went straight to air.
‘This is Piers Morgan live. Breaking news tonight, a Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 239 people, bound for Beijing, is missing,’ the bulletin started. ‘According to a statement from the airline, air traffic control lost contact with Flight MH370, from Kuala Lumpur at 2:40am, about two hours after take-off. We are awaiting a press briefing from the airline, which of course we will bring you live when it happens.’
It was the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, who had the horrifying task of fronting up and officially breaking the extraordinary news at the press conference.
‘We are deeply saddened this morning,’ Ahmad Jauhari told journalists.
He outlined details of the flight and who in general terms was known to be on it, who the captain and first officer were, and said the focus was to work with the emergency response.
‘Our thoughts and prayers are with all affected passengers and crew and their family members.’
It was an extraordinary story: a big airliner, 239 people, and the operative words ‘missing’ or ‘disappeared’.
‘An international search and rescue operation is underway after a passenger jet disappeared over the South China Sea early this morning,’ was how one British presenter broke the news to her television audience.
But not everyone is glued to television or radio news, or internet news sites. For some of those whose husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, and in a few cases children, came to disappear on a regular scheduled flight, the horror of what had happened came in ways they still break down in telling.
For Danica and Paul Weeks, 7 March 2014 was the day all their luck seemed to be going the right way.
‘Everything was great,’ Danica told me in an interview near her home on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. ‘We had two little boys, I had a beautiful husband, he had this great job.’
The couple lived in Perth, and Paul was headed to Beijing for induction to a big assignment for a major mining project in Mongolia. It was his big break as an engineer.
Danica and Paul had been together for 14 years. They first hooked up when they were both young, expatriate Antipodeans, doing the usual ‘grand tour’ of living in Britain on two-year working visas and seeing Europe.
‘We met at the Munich Beer Fest,’ Danica said of how she first found her husband. With a bit of a smirk, she added, ‘I moved in with him two weeks later.’ That lovenest was in Turnpike Lane, London, N8 0DU, in the year 2000.
Paul had grown up in Christchurch, and been a mechanic in the New Zealand army. After the sojourn in Europe, he wanted to go home and enrol in university to study mechanical engineering. Though her family had moved to Queensland’s Sunshine Coast when she was 10, Danica was also originally a New Zealander, having been born in the North Island town of Napier, so the move to Christchurch was to familiar territory.
The couple lived in Christchurch for 10 years, with Danica, a chartered professional accountant, putting Paul through university, after which he made a good living doing energy audits on buildings. Then the family’s first external calamity arose.
‘I had Lincoln during the first earthquake,’ Danica explained. ‘After that they didn’t need energy audits on buildings because the buildings were collapsing.’
So, the couple moved to Perth, just as the mining boom started to get into gear. After working in the sector for some years, Paul was made an extraordinary offer. A contact at Rio Tinto was heading to Mongolia to work on the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine in the Gobi Desert. He invited Paul to come to Oyu Tolgoi to work as a supervisor, Danica said, as the company was having challenges on the site.
‘He wanted Paul to come and sort it out,’ Danica said. ‘He was really excited, it was his dream job.’
The deal was that Paul would work 28 days on, 14 days off. Given how hard he worked in Western Australia, Danica said, though the absences would be long, the fortnight of concentrated family time sounded good.
For the Weeks family, it looked like the start of a dream run. Danica drove Paul to the airport, with her sons Lincoln, aged three and a half at the time, and Jack, 11 months, in the back getting ready to head on to Lincoln’s soccer training.
‘I dropped him off, we told each other we loved each other,’ Danica recounted. ‘I remember crying, because it was a change for us – he was going for 28 days. I bawled my eyes out.’ Danica observed that all couples have their own sayings – some trite, some schmalzy. Theirs was ‘the cream always rises to the top’, and they said it to each other before Paul headed onto the flight to Kuala Lumpur. Danica says she stills sees Paul’s departure in her mind’s eye.
‘He just walks out that door, and that’s that.’
‘To me, March 8, 2014 was like yesterday,’ Danica said.
The television in the kitchen wasn’t working, so while she might have kept an eye on it otherwise, she was just pottering around with household chores and having coffee with her mum as she did most Saturdays at the local shopping centre.
Later that afternoon the phone rang. A woman on the other end of the line asked after Paul. When Danica said he wasn’t there and she hadn’t spoken with him, the woman on the phone – a reporter from the New Zealand Herald – then asked: ‘You haven’t heard there has been an incident with the plane?’
‘I just dropped the phone, I went into hysterics, I just ran out the door and fell on the grass,’ Danica related. ‘I thought it had crashed.’ Paul’s mother was living just down the road and heard the shrieks, recognised Danica’s voice, and rushed over. Danica tried to get a grip.
‘The plane’s missing. I thought, okay, it’s just missing. Gather yourself.’
Paul’s brother Peter was staying with their mother down the road, and was assigned to check that the flight in question, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, was indeed Paul’s flight.
‘He just came back and said yes, it’s his plane.’
Fortunately, Danica’s mother and stepdad were living in their caravan in Perth at the time, as part of their five-year travels around Australia.
‘She’s the only one who got me through all this,’ Danica said. ‘Mum and I just sat on the couch crying and screaming.’
Danica said later in the day Lincoln came into the bathroom while she was in the shower and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I said “Daddy is missing darling”. He said “don’t worry, Mum, I find him”.’
Still hysterical and in a daze, it was then Danica called Lincoln’s best friend’s mother and asked if she could have Lincoln over to stay for a few nights as she feared the emotional toll it would take on her young son as the whirlwind of reporters descended on her house.
Danica debated what to do about the journalists camped outside – there were not, all up, that many Australian next-of-kin whose family members had disappeared on MH370, making those who were, prime targets for media interviews.
Danica said she sought counsel from friends from her London days who were in Perth as to whether she should speak to the media, and they put to her, ‘if you are up to doing it, I think you should’.
Danica went out to talk to the media scrum, saying to herself, ‘I am doing it for Pauly, I want him found. I think this is the way to do it.’
She says it was one of the best moves she made, empowering her both immediately and over the coming years.
Danica described the media as ‘totally respectful’ and ‘amazing with me’.
‘Here I am a housewife, working part time,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have a voice to talk, the media gave that to me.’
It helped a bit in dealing with the extraordinary circumstances of having sent her husband off on a trip on a major airline one day, and learning a day later he had disappeared on a big modern airliner which just vanished without explanation.
‘Everything since then is like a blur, and there is nothing more I know from that day.’
‘I made Mum sleep in my bed for four months afterwards.’
For Brisbane couples Cathy and Bob Lawton, and Mary and Rodney Burrows, it was to be the ultimate break: a five-week overseas trip in which each of the four of them got to tick off at least one item on their ‘bucket list’ of places they wanted to see in their lifetimes.
The Lawton and Burrows families had become deeply intertwined over many years; the link began when the Lawtons’ second of three daughters, Amanda, became friends at school with the Burrows’ eldest son, Jayden. The itinerary of the trip the two middle-aged couples planned to take together reflected an aggregate of circumstances, special longings and cost considerations.
‘Originally Cathy really wanted to go to Alaska, and it was the money that put her off such an expensive trip,’ Cathy Lawton’s sister Jeanette Maguire said in an interview at her home in the Brisbane western suburb of Forest Lake where she lives with her husband Shaun and their children.
Cathy and Jeanette’s nephew had married a Vietnamese girl and they lived in Vietnam. Cathy had really wanted to go to the wedding, but couldn’t make it.
‘She decided, “I never got to visit Vietnam then, so let’s go”,’ Jeanette said.
The plan was to fly to Beijing, travel to Hong Kong, and take a ‘celebrity millennium cruise’ to Vietnam.
‘That was a last-minute decision to go to China; Cathy wanted to see the Great Wall, and the Burrows said sure, we’ll go there as well,’ Jeanette said.
Kuala Lumpur was then tacked on because Bob’s cousin lived there. All up, it had the lot.
‘They were so excited,’ Jeanette said of her sister and brother-in-law’s anticipation. ‘They had been talking about it constantly. They were coming up to their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.’
It had been an at times hard road for the couple, who married as childhood sweethearts when Cathy was 19. Bob worked for a plywood company, and Cathy as a commercial artist – until some tragic quirks of health stopped her.
‘Cathy was born blind with glaucoma,’ Jeanette said. ‘They operated on her when she was a baby, and she gained full sight in one eye. They scarred the other eye.’ Cathy grew up very visually impaired. She had to wear glasses, and she struggled in the classroom.
Over the course of her life, Cathy’s eye colour changed slightly, three times: she had to have three cornea transplants, and the matches to the original were the best available but naturally a bit different.
‘Her glaucoma was under control until it came back when she fell pregnant with their first child,’ Jeanette said. ‘That was the horrific part. She couldn’t go back to work after she had Glenda. She couldn’t see well enough, although she used a big magnifying glass.’
‘She never had any self-pity . . . She was always clear on what she wanted and how to get there.’
The last time Jeanette saw her sister was on the Sunday before MH370 disappeared.
‘We celebrated her birthday. Went out for lunch,’ Jeanette said.
The following Saturday, Jeanette was preparing to attend her children’s first soccer game of the season. ‘The phone rang, it was my niece Glenda, and she said, “Mum and Dad’s plane has gone missing.”
‘I said, “How do you know?”
‘She said, “Mum and Dad’s close friend was working and saw a live post come up. They knew the itinerary.”
‘I said, “Shaun, turn the TV on, turn the TV on.”’
Jeanette asked if her mother – Glenda’s grandmother – had been told. Then she instructed Glenda to gather everyone together at her grandmother’s house. ‘Shaun was asking me what was going on, and I couldn’t get the words out,’ Jeanette said. She checked the itinerary to make sure they had the right flight. ‘Then I lost it. It was tough.’
Jeanette was determined to keep life normal for her family until more was known, and insisted Shaun take the boys to soccer.
Cathy and Jeanette’s elder sister Eileen was on a family day trip to Mount Tambourine, and she asked them to pick her up on their way back through.
‘I couldn’t drive, I think I had gone into a state of shock. I was just falling apart, minute by minute.’
Jeanette and Shaun Maguire had a particularly good set of neighbours.
‘We knocked on the door and I couldn’t speak. I felt like I’d been drugged.’
One neighbour made calls on Jeanette’s behalf, including to the Department of Foreign Affairs. Then Eileen arrived with her family, and took Jeanette to their mother’s house.
‘Cathy’s face came up on the TV – they had hacked her Facebook page, it was devastating.’
Jeanette spent the first four days at her parents’ house, ringing Malaysia Airlines and asking if Cathy had boarded the plane.
‘They told us they couldn’t tell us anything.’
One evening, while sitting in recliners and watching the initial stages of the search on TV, Jeanette said, ‘I don’t know why they are searching there, the plane’s gone left. I don’t know, I just felt it.’