When her boyfriend, American Philip Wood, boarded a doomed Malaysian Airlines jet in March, Sarah Bajc had no idea it would be the last time she would ever see him. As the world would soon learn, flight MH370 was about to be lost in mid-flight, leading to a media circus and feverish hunt for the apparently crashed plane.
As of September, there is frustratingly little evidence indicating what happened to the flight, leading some to suggest it was hijacked and is purposefully being held pending a large-scale terrorist attack.
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Bajc, however, doesn’t know what happened to the plane or her boyfriend. She does believe that somebody knows more than they are letting on, though.
She told NBC News that she thinks “something is being covered up,” identifying what she believes are “active steps” by some entity to thwart the successful recovery of the plane.
Beyond that assertion, she admitted that she doesn’t know who or what might be behind such a plot — nor what the motive might be.
“We don’t know why or what is being covered up,” she said, “but something is being covered up.”
A few specific groups, including the investigative team in Australia, are targets of her suspicion. She said the officials have run a fool’s errand in following dead leads.
“The pursued a path of underwater pings long after it was very clear they weren’t accurate,” she lamented. “They have not had the strength or will to force Malaysia to open up all of its records.”
Bajc is not alone among the loved ones of those lost on the flight. A group of hundreds in similar situations have joined forces to urge the release of investigative reports and other information that might shed some light on the dearth of data over the past six months.
Without some clear answers, Bajc and others who are missing someone aboard that flight are stuck in limbo between mourning their loss and holding out hope that their loved ones might still be alive.
“Can you imagine what it would be like to have a memorial service for somebody,” she asked, “giving up on them because you had just run out of energy to push for the right answers — and then a couple months they actually come back home? Can you imagine what that would do to you psychologically?”
She said that Wood deserves her continued diligence in pursuing answers and calling for change in a system that allowed an entire commercial airliner to simply vanish.
“I don’t buy the issue of cost,” Bajc said of a program that would install devices in all planes to track their position at all times, arguing that “you can put a GPS tracking device in your dog for $75.”