< A Vanished Jetliner Still Haunts Families Of The Missing

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

By far the biggest mystery of 2014 was the disappearance of a commercial airplane with 239 people onboard. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Unintelligible) To Beijing (unintelligible) for departure.

CORNISH: Everything seemed normal for the first 40 minutes. And as it left Malaysian airspace...

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Goodnight, Malaysian 370.

CORNISH: Goodnight, Malaysian 370, the final words heard from the plane. Minutes later, it vanished from radar screens. And still, no trace of wreckage has been found. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel has this story of has happened since to a woman whose partner was aboard that flight.

GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Sarah Bajc and Philip Wood were in the process of moving from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur. Wood has started a new job there. He was flying back to Beijing on Flight 370 to help finish packing.

SARAH BAJC: The movers arrived at 9 o'clock on March 8. And of course, Philip wasn't there. And I had just learned the news that the flight had gone missing.

BRUMFIEL: The movers turned around and left Bajc standing among the boxes. The plane's mysterious disappearance left her stranded between her old life and the new one she'd been planning with Wood.

BAJC: So somewhere along the line in those first weeks, I made the decision I would still come here.

BRUMFIEL: Today, she lives in Kuala Lumpur in the apartment she and Wood picked out together. She started a new job teaching at an international school.

BAJC: I go to work. I go out socially on occasion. I've developed some nice friends.

BRUMFIEL: But a big part of Bajc's life is still spent trying to understand what happened to her partner. She and other people whose loved ones disappeared on the plane are still searching for answers.

BAJC: I spend a couple hours, you know, on the weekends, maybe an hour or so each evening, continuing to talk to experts in the industry. You know, we've hired a private investigator. I speak with them. I talk to the other family members.

BRUMFIEL: She says she and the other families went through an emotional storm in the first month after the crash. Every twist and turn in the search was being reported on 24-hour cable news. It was like watching a real-time thriller.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Satellites capture more images of debris floating in the Indian Ocean. But the question remains, is it from the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370?

BAJC: Every time there was a new sighting of debris, you know, you have this incredible new burst of adrenaline of what might be. And, you know, then, of course, another crashing as it's all disproven over and over and over again. So that was awful.

BRUMFIEL: The ups and downs were made worse by confusing and sometimes contradictory statements from Malaysian investigators. Bajc says her breaking point came one night in late March.

BAJC: And a text message came in on my phone.

BRUMFIEL: It was from the airline. And it said they now knew everyone on board was dead.

BAJC: Irrefutably, the plane has gone down on the southern Indian Ocean, and all lives were lost.

BRUMFIEL: Bajc broke down that night. But in the days that followed, the plane's wreckage never turned up. Today, she no longer believes the investigators.

BAJC: There has not been a single thing that they had said that has been proven to be true. There have been many, many, many things that they have said that have proven to be false and/or outright lies.

BRUMFIEL: The head of Malaysia's investigation team did not respond to an NPR email request for an interview. But Australian investigator Martin Dolan says he stands by the official account.

MARTIN DOLAN: There's a lot of people who are asserting that information is being concealed or distorted. We don't believe that's the case.

BRUMFIEL: Dolan heads the Australian transportation safety bureau, which is aiding in the search for the missing plane. He says his agency has independently reviewed all data from radar and satellites. And this is what it shows. After Flight 370 vanished, the plane made a series of unexpected turns that led it south to the remote reaches of the Indian Ocean. It flew for hours, then ran out of fuel and crashed. But Dolan acknowledges the evidence is fragmentary, blips on a military radar, brief pings from an orbiting satellite.

DOLAN: And so if you're looking for a solution to the mystery of what has happened to someone you very much love, that's not a satisfactory thing, and we understand that. And the only way we can give that satisfaction is by finding the aircraft.

BRUMFIEL: Without the finality of the wreckage, Sarah Bajc says many families are in limbo. They don't want to complete paperwork that would normally follow the death of a loved one, and that's leading to a different sort of crisis.

BAJC: The reality is there are some of the families that are in desperate need of the financial closure on things like insurance and they need something in order to be able to collect on policies. I mean, you've got women who were left with children and no career. And they need help, so something's going to have to break. But the issuance of a death certificate is an emotional thing because we're not convinced that they're dead.

BRUMFIEL: When Philip Wood first disappeared, Bajc still felt his presence.

BAJC: For a long time, I still felt him with me. I mean, really physically felt him with me. That lasted for months. It lasted even through moving here. I feel that less frequently now.

BRUMFIEL: But Bajc says without wreckage, she can't give up on the possibility he's somehow alive.

BAJC: There is still a chance. And until that's disproven, I will continue to search for him.

BRUMFIEL: Meanwhile, in the southern Indian Ocean, two sonar-equipped search vessels are inching their way across the open sea. They're scanning the bottom for debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.

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