Relatives still desperate for answers one year after Flight MH370 vanished

As the one year anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 approaches, relatives remain desperate for answers.

The Beijing-bound Boeing 777 aircraft carrying 239 passengers and crew disappeared on March 8 last year, shortly after taking off from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.

Months of searches have failed to turn up any trace.

On January 29, Abdul Rahman, the Director-General of Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation, said in a televised announcement that missing flight MH370 was ‘an accident’, and that all passengers and crew on board the flight were presumed to have lost their lives.

This cleared the way for the airline to pay compensation to victims’ relatives.

Some of the family members of those on board the missing flight were reluctant to believe the flight’s disappearance was simply an accident, arguing there was insufficient evidence to substantiate the claim.

Malaysia, along with China and Australia, has continued the search for the missing plane in the southern Indian Ocean, off the coast of Perth, Australia.

The undersea search has covered almost a third of its target area, Malaysian authorities said in February, adding that the undersea search of a 60,000 square km (23,000 square miles) area is expected to be completed by May.

Malaysia Airlines has suffered enormously since the disaster, leading to a drastic restructuring program that was announced in August last year.

The airline’s troubles had significantly worsened on July 17 when another jet, Flight MH17, was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

The country’s civil aviation authorities plan to release an interim report on the investigation on March 7, a day before the first anniversary of the flight’s disappearance.