Now that the last faint hope for the 239 people on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight has been ended by the announcement that nobody could have survived, the incident will move into a different phase. For the loved ones of those on MH370, proper grieving can begin.
For the Malaysian authorities, the focus will also be on how they handled the situation and particularly the way in which information was disseminated. While one has to have a degree of sympathy for officials who suddenly found themselves facing the voracious appetite of the global media’s 24-hour news cycle at a time when there was a paucity of verified and relevant information, the Malaysian response has – with some justification – been singled out for criticism.
For grieving families who had spent much of the last 17 days clinging to the slightest hope for a miraculous outcome, it must have added to the trauma to learn that the Malaysian authorities knew soon after the MH370 went missing that it had probably flown to the area south west of Perth where the search for debris has been focused. The anger displayed by some relatives, dozens of whom protested outside Malaysia's embassy in Beijing, is entirely understandable.
One might expect that while the information provided to the public, including to the families of those on board, might be restricted, more information might be shared on a government-to-government level. But on this too, the Malaysian authorities were found wanting. It is unseemly when China – hardly the paragon of openness and transparency – has to make a formal request for “more thorough and accurate information” about a flight that was headed to its capital and whose citizens dominated the passenger list.
Undoubtedly, the Malaysian government will also be looking at how it handled the disappearance of MH370 and seeing how it could do better. It will have learnt hard lessons that news vacuums are always filled, often with baseless speculation, and that conspiracy theories flourish when relevant facts are not released promptly.
In the meantime, the search for MH370’s flight recorders must continue with all haste. The prospect of them remaining lost and the world never discovering why and how the plane went missing is too awful to contemplate.