Families and friends of the passengers on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 are taking the search for the missing flight into their own hands.
A group led by Sarah Bajc, partner of passenger Philip Wood, is looking to crowdfund a $5 million reward to either entice someone with knowledge of the disappearance of Flight MH370 to come forward, or to fund a full-blown private investigation of what happened on March 8 when the jet took off from Kuala Lumpur, made a dramatic turn away from its route to Beijing, and went missing.
The group, known as Reward MH370, is using the crowd-sourcing site indiegogo to help its efforts.
"The official investigation being run by governments and agencies has failed to find the plane, due to either incompetence or obfuscation. We must work together to ensure the truth is found," the group says on the site. "On behalf of the 3.1 billion people who fly every year we must find the truth and bring those accountable to justice. We must also prevent this from ever happening again."
Reward MH370 is made up of a Governance Committee of seven people, including five family members and two others. One of them is Brazilian businessman Maarten Van Sluys, who lost his sister on the Air France Flight 447 disaster in 2009 and was instrumental in the search and recovery of that plane.
"This recovery is going to take all the efforts of a great deal of people and I applaud the initiative of this project and the potential it will bring to the solving of this mystery," he said.
The group made it clear their efforts would not be in opposition to the ongoing investigation. But they also made it clear they are frustrated with the fact that, three months after the disappearance, not a single piece of wreckage has been found.
The group "seeks to uncover clues not yet discovered, and to pursue that evidence without interference from parties who are also liability holders in this case. We hope to plug doubts, overcome shortcomings, and improve the number of actionable leads towards in the search for MH370. The accountability of the authorities remains undiluted."
The $5 million they hope to raise by July 8 will be used in stages. Stage One is to fund a reward in the hope that someone with knowledge of what happened will come forward with actionable information. Stage Two will be to engage a professional, licensed private investigation company to follow up on this information and provide additional searching based on those qualified leads. The third stage of the campaign, involving any unused funds, will be to lobby governments around the world to invoke real change in air safety, aviation procedures, aircraft tracking, passport security and to ensure this situation never happens again.
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