KUALA LUMPUR, June 4 — Families of the 239 passengers and crew aboard flight MH370 will not be ignored, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said today amid growing discontent over the the fruitless search for the missing plane.
The acting transport minister said the multi-national team involved in the search are duty bound to carry out their work transparently and to the best of their ability so as the families can find closure to the incident, which has gone on for 89 days as of today.
Hishammuddin said it was clear the families want finality to the whole affair, after meeting with families of the Chinese passengers aboard the Malaysia Airlines-owned plane during an official visit to Beijing last week.
“To be fair to the families in Beijing, all they want to hear from us is that the search continues, and I gave them that assurance,” he told journalists after chairing a meeting on the search for flight MH370.
“It is the same for the local families (in Malaysia)... in the circumstances, I’m quite happy with how we have conducted ourselves, but we can do more,” he added.
Family members of the crew on board the missing plane recently alleged of being neglected by the airline and Malaysian authorities, and the announcement by Australian authorities to call off the first phase of the search only compounded their frustrations.
The National Union of Flight Attendants Malaysia (Nufam) also demanded that MAS and the government do what they can to help the families of the flight attendants, who they claim have not received any aid beyond caretaker services.
Hishammuddin said today that the views of the families of the plane’s crew members were fair and promised that they can approach him and the next-of-kin committee under deputy Foreign Minister Datuk Hamzah Zainuddin for any clarification.
He also urged the families to deal directly with Hamzah’s committee to determine the issues related to compensation or financial aid.
“On compensation, I know they’ve looked at it from the beginning. It involves insurance companies, technical issues, but this is something that even MAS must get involved in,” he said, referring to the national carrier.
The Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said on May 29 that the first phase of the search had ended with no trace of the plane.
The search will enter a new phase covering a 60,000 square kilometre area along MH370’s probable flight arc over the southern Indian Ocean, but only after a bathymetric survey map of the sea floor is completed within a three-month window.
The ongoing search for flight MH370 is considered the longest and most expensive in the world’s aviation history, with the Reuters news agency estimating costs to have hit RM141 million for the first month alone.
The Boeing 777 jet, which was carrying 239 people on board, disappeared on March 8 after the plane veered from its Beijing-bound flight path and flew in the opposite direction towards the southern Indian Ocean.
