In the sixteen days since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur and failed to land in Beijing, setting off a search that has involved two dozen nations, more than three million square miles, and at least three hundred relentless hours of cable-news coverage, we seem to have learned everything about the missing plane apart from its final location: the safety record of Boeing 777s, the political commitments of its pilot, the data from its ACARS transmissions, the significance of satellite pings. The front page of Sunday’s New York Times featured a three-thousand-word reconstruction of the flight and the investigation, assembled by sixteen reporters in eight cities, who unearthed more specks of detail. One passenger bought a bracelet watch for his wife at a duty-free shop before departing. Another—an Iranian man smuggling himself to Europe on a stolen passport—nervously smoked a few cigarettes before walking into the terminal.
The suffering of the passengers’ families has provided an uneasy ballast to the obsessive speculation about the plane’s fate, at once helping to justify the enormous attention to the story—by virtue of the tragic loss of life—and making that attention sometimes appear crass. But now, for these families, the only mystery that matters has come to an end. Late on Monday night, in Beijing, relatives of the missing were summoned to an “emergency meeting” shortly before Najib Razak, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, appeared before the press. In a statement sent to the families, and, where possible, delivered in person, the airline announced what has long been almost inevitable: “We have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived…. We must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”
While the sequence of events on board the plane remains mostly unknown, the airline was able to make a more confident judgment of its fate using a new analysis of the existing data. The satellite firm Inmarsat, working with British investigators, determined that the plane’s final satellite pings placed its last known position near the southern end of the now-familiar twin arcs on the map. The elimination of the more outlandish, and more hopeful, scenarios—in which the plane evaded ground-radar systems across South Asia and landed somewhere beyond the Hindu Kush—suggests that only the worst outcome remains. (Somewhat less significant, one persistent leitmotif of the meta-coverage, a wide-eyed wonder at the marvel of a disappearing plane in our age of mass technological surveillance, has finally been put to rest.)
On Monday, reporters in Beijing described a wrenching scene at the Lido Hotel, where many of the relatives have been immured since the plane vanished: at least two people were wheeled off on stretchers after fainting at the news, and a police contingent was called in to maintain some semblance of calm. “Most of the relatives are still inside the conference room in Beijing,” Malcolm Moore, the Daily Telegraph’s Beijing correspondent, tweeted. “Where else do they have to go?” Daniel Liau, the Malaysian gallerist who had organized an exhibition for a group of Chinese artists on the missing flight, told the Wall Street Journal that he wasn’t ready to give up just yet. “Even though it’s ninety-nine per cent, we still have a one per cent chance,” he said. “It’s very hard to accept.”
We will no doubt hear that, for those whose loved ones vanished without explanation sixteen days ago, this moment represents some intimation of that elusive quantity known as closure, however painful its arrival. But that conclusion seems doubly false: too much about how and why their relatives died remains to be determined, and even that knowledge, when it eventually surfaces, will still feel insufficient to the scale of their losses. But, whatever closure consists of, it describes a process rather than a point; today, at least, that process can begin.
Photograph by Lintao Zhang/Getty.
