KUALA LUMPUR, June 6 — Desperate for new leads, families of passengers aboard the ill-fated Flight MH370 from five countries will launch next week a campaign to raise US$5 million (RM16.1 million) to reward whistleblowers and private investigators to aid their search for the missing plane.
USA Today reported today that the campaign — to appear on popular crowd-funding site Indiegogo next Monday — involves families from the US, Australia, New Zealand, France and India.
The initiative, however, does not include families of passengers and crew from China or Malaysia, who made up the bulk of the 239 people on board the commercial flight.
Sarah Bajc, whose partner Philip Wood was among those aboard the missing plane, told the US paper that the families were “taking matters into our own hands” as they believe “there is no credible evidence” to support claims the jumbo jet had fallen into the southern Indian Ocean where search efforts are concentrated.
“I’m convinced that somebody is concealing something,” the 48-year-old American, who teaches business studies in Beijing, China, was quoted saying.
Dubbed the “Reward MH370: The Search for the Truth” campaign, it aims to raise US$3 million (RM9.66 million) as a reward for a whistleblower to come forward with key information related to the incident.
Another US$2 million (RM6.44 million) will go to hire private investigators to follow up on leads.
The aim is to hire a professional company licenced to operate in multiple countries and Bajc said she expected the effort to include cellphone tower records that fall under the projected flight path.
Bajc said she and the other families involved in the campaign are following the example of family members of passengers on the Air France 447 accident, which killed all on board when it nose-dived into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
“Air France was also declared unsolvable and un-findable. Family members got together and insisted the search be kept alive,” she told the American daily.
Bajc acknowledged that US$2 million is just a fraction of the money already spent in the three months searching for the missing Boeing 777, which is why they will tackle the mystery using “human intelligence” instead of repeating the same methodology currently used by search teams scouring the depths of the remote Indian Ocean.
She stressed that “there are no promises here, but we believe we need to try something, as if we just sit back on our heels and allow the existing path to continue, I don’t think this will ever be solved”.
They hope to find a whistleblower who knows where the plane is located or a flight controller with access to new data, even at the risk of dealing with “some unethical people”, she added.
“I don’t care. I just want to find the plane,” she said.
The Australian-led Joint Agency Coordination Centre 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.
