A relative of a passenger who was on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 cries before she speaks to Malaysian representatives during a briefing at Lido Hotel in Beijing April 21, 2014. – Reuters pic, April 25, 2014.
Families of passengers on board flight MH370 are now turning to shareholders of aircraft manufacturer Boeing after failing to get any direct answers from Putrajaya and Malaysia Airlines to lingering questions over the investigation into the missing flight.
Spearheading the effort is Sarah Bajc, partner of Philip Wood, who was on board the plane, which was en route to Beijing on March 8 before it mysteriously disappeared.
"We will be bringing (the issue) directly to Boeing," Bajc told CNN.
"Boeing has a shareholders meeting next week. And if we're not getting information directly from Malaysia Airlines and from the Malaysian government, we might as well try to go directly to the source."
In its response, Boeing told CNN that it was playing its role as a technical adviser to the National Transportation Safety Board, being "an active and engaged party to the investigation".
Bajc said that as an American company whose Boeing 777-200ER was used by flight MH370, Boeing had a "little bit more fiduciary responsibility".
She had earlier hit out at Malaysian officials, saying Malaysia's acceptance of the data analysis by British satellite firm Inmarsat had not been put to scientific scrutiny.
"They have failed to share why they would accept a single source (Inmarsat) for analysis utilising a never-before-attempted method as their sole ground for determining that the plane is under the water and all lives lost," the Wall Street Journal quoted her email sent to the media earlier this week.
She also took a swipe at Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, who in an exclusive interview with CNN last night announced that a preliminary report would soon be made public.
"I'm just so astounded by this new shift that the prime minister is taking... He's reading from a script sheet that some qualified, professional PR person has put together for him," Bajc told CNN.
In the interview, Najib said the report had been submitted to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
Contacted by CNN later, ICAO said the report includes, among others, a request by Malaysia for the use of real-time tracking of commercial aircraft.
This latest bid by Bajc and others like her reflects growing scepticism among the affected families of the 239 passengers over the satellite data analysis used by Malaysia in concluding that the plane had ended its journey in the southern Indian Ocean.
Calls for a review of the search area have grown in recent days, as not a single piece of debris which could confirm the accuracy of the satellite analysis has been found, 49 days after the plane went missing.
Despite the increasing pessimism, the Perth-based Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) supervising the massive search said the search continues today with up to 8 military aircraft and 10 ships deployed.
In a statement emailed to The Malaysian Insider, JACC said the search would continue to focus an area some 1500 kilometres north–west of Perth, covering a 10-km radius, where signals believed to be from a plane's flight recorders were earlier detected.
JACC said despite the US Navy's sophisticated underwater drone Bluefin-21 having covered 95% of the focus area, "no contacts of interest have been found to date". – April 25, 2014.
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