MH370: One month on, the pain is still strong

SHE puts on a welcoming smile as she steps onto the plane, greeting the passengers at the door and leading them to their seats.

Going through the checklist and security procedures, she makes sure that everything runs smoothly on board before finally strapping herself in for takeoff.

She has done this a thousand times before. A routine performed with finesse and a warm smile – a reflection of a culture of excellent hospitality that has always set Malaysia Airlines (MAS) apart from the rest.

Beneath that smile, however, now, lies an unsettling feeling of loss and fear.

“It could have been me,” she says, referring to the 10 cabin crew that vanished with 227 passengers on flight MH370 a month ago.

A flight attendant for nearly 25 years with MAS, Farah (not her real name) is one of the many employees struggling to cope with the loss of their colleagues -- many of them close friends too -- while still striving to put on their best foot forward each day.

“I cry whenever I put on my uniform now. I look at myself in the mirror and think that I survived, but not them. I try not to look up the sky anymore because when I do, I wonder where they are," she says, choking back tears.

One month into the disappearance of MH370, with the largest and costliest search and rescue (SAR) operations in the history of aviation underway to locate the plane, the world is still baffled at how a plane could just disappear.

While the SAR is fighting a race against time to find the plane (the black box battery that transmits emergency beacon signal is expected to die soon), grieving family members and friends of passengers and crew on MH370 are confronted with the reality that they may never know what exactly happened to their loved ones.

“Even after a month since the incident, the first thing the crew members will do is hug each other whenever we meet at the crew deployment centre. It used to be a fun place where the crew will gather, chit-chat and laugh before our flight. That has changed.”

“Many of crew members on MH370 were the sole breadwinners to their families. Who’s going to help them now?” Farah adds.

The crew members flying that Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route on MH370 were mostly senior MAS staffers comprising Patrick Francis Gomes, Andrew Nari, Goh Sock Lay, Mohd Hazrin Mohamed Hasnan or affectionately known as ‘Rain’, Junaidi Mohd Kassim, Tan Ser Kuin, Wan Swaid Wan Ismail, Ng Yar Chien, Foong Wai Yueng and Tan Size Hiang.

Its pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and First Officer, Fariq Ab Hamid, meanwhile, have been intensively scrutinized and sometimes unfairly represented by the media as possible ‘terrorists’ even as investigators continue to believe someone deliberately disabled the communications and possibly manoeuvred the plane from its original flight path.

“Certain media are making speculations out of nothing. They come up with theories that hold no truth, no evidence. Lots of things have been said the past four weeks. It upsets everyone,” says President of National Union of Flight Attendants Malaysia (Nufam) Ismail Nasaruddin of the accusations made against the two pilots.

“This is something totally unimaginable to us that a plane can just disappear. What is disturbing is there is no sign or trail. We feel so clueless and lost," he says.

Even at this point of time, authorities have failed to find even a shred of evidence in perhaps the biggest aviation mystery in history; the disappearance of MH370 will call for a relook into the safety and security aspect of air travel.

“The question that people want to know now is whether it will be safe to fly? There is fear in everyone’s mind, even the crew.” Ismail adds.

“There is now a sense of fear but we still need to carry out our duties. I had to take a week off from work when I found out what had happened. They are my friends,” says another flight steward who has been with MAS for ten years.

Crew members, apart from their servicing duties, have also been trained to play an active and crucial part in ensuring safety in flight.

"I serve the cockpit and I never worry much if somebody was standing outside the door. Now I am so careful – I look around and call the captain to inform him that I’m coming in, even though there is a camera that he can view from inside the cockpit,” a chief stewardess from MAS says.

“I seldom do passenger profiling but now I pay more attention to passengers and what they carry on board,” she adds.

The loss of flight MH370, and the still unexplained circumstances leading to its disappearance, has not only created a sense of fear in air travel, it has left an unsettling feeling that the plane, which presumably went down in the loneliest part of the earth and we may never get to it to find out what really happened in the early hours of March 8, 2014.

As for now, family members, friends and colleagues of the 239 souls on flight MH370 and everyone affected by it can only carry on with a heavy sense of grief with no answers.