It’s nearly a year since Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished – and despite an international rescue operation, no trace of it has emerged. Could relatives of the missing passengers solve modern aviation’s biggest mystery for themselves?

A year ago, on 8 March 2014, an American schoolteacher named Sarah Bajc sat in her Beijing apartment waiting for the plane carrying her boyfriend Philip to land. Her anxiety was growing; there had been sketchy news reports that a plane had vanished from radar screens, so she was hitting refresh on a flight-tracker website. Refresh. Delayed. Refresh. Delayed. Refresh. Missing.



At the same time, an Australian businessman and part-time private investigator named Ethan Hunt was flying from Dubai to Paris. The first reports mistakenly said the missing plane was travelling from the Far East to Europe, so Ethan’s niece, frantic with worry, was repeatedly emailing him. When Ethan landed in Paris and saw the panicky messages, he caught a taxi to his hotel and turned on the TV. “And all I did after that was watch CNN,” he tells me.

The news reports were bizarre. The plane, MH370, had taken off at 12.41am and been on its scheduled path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, when it just disappeared. No distress signal had been sent. A Japan-bound pilot on another Boeing 777 said he had contacted MH370 at 1.30am, to ask if it had entered Vietnamese airspace, and had received “only static and mumbling in return”.

In the scramble for information, the Malaysian authorities made odd, contradictory statements. On 11 March, air force chief Tan Sri Rodzali Daud reportedly said the plane had last been detected at 2.40am near Pulau Perak, an island in the Malacca Strait – a massive detour: instead of travelling north to China, it had doubled back across Malaysia. Later that day, Daud denied he had said such a thing. The next day he said the last radar signal had been received at 2.15am from a different location, 200 miles north-west of Penang. The day after that, the time of the signal was amended to 2.30am.

On 15 March, the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, announced that someone on board MH370 had shut down the communication systems and, after that, the plane had seemingly drifted for six hours, with all 239 passengers and crew incapacitated by oxygen starvation. Malaysian police raided the pilot’s home for clues: had he ditched the plane as some kind of political protest? He was a known supporter of the opposition leader. Meanwhile photographs had emerged of the co-pilot with his arm around young women he had allowed into the cockpit on previous flights. Could he be to blame?

The theories began to stack up: MH370 had landed on a Malaysian military base called Butterworth, had been hijacked by terrorists, or destroyed in a corporate insurance scam; it had been seized by Chinese or American operatives who wanted access to the 20 employees of a US tech company on board, manufacturers of microchips for the defence industry.

Millions of internet users tried to help, scouring satellite images in the hope of spotting the plane. I was one of them. But after 10 minutes of looking at grainy shots of ocean, I got bored and gave up.

“I’m no expert,” wrote Courtney Love on her Facebook page, “but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick. It’s like a mile away from Pulau Perak, where they ‘last’ tracked it 5°39’08.5”N 98°50’38.0”E but what do I know?” Investigators were urged to check out oil slicks and debris, white specks floating in the ocean off Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia. The official search widened to cover 2.24m square nautical miles, or 1.5% of the planet – impossible, unfathomable distances.

1 8 March Plane takes off from Kuala Lumpur airport, heading for Beijing

2 Communications turned off. Plane turns west

3 10 March Initial search area

4 14 March Data suggests plane may have been flown deliberately off course towards the Andaman Islands

5 16 March Satellite data indicates MH370 was still in the air seven and a half hours after takeoff; its last recorded ‘ping’ was somewhere along a northern or southern arc

6 16, 17 March Debris sighted, a false alarm

7 18 March Australian government releases map showing two possible flight paths

8 21 March French report of debris, later discounted

9 23 March New search area identified

10 24 March Debris sighted, later discounted

During these confused and hysterical days, Sarah Bajc was frequently interviewed on television. On 10 March, a CBS news reporter spoke to her at her flat in Beijing. She cried and said, “The clothes in his closet are the worst. I open the closet and it smells like him.” She and Philip Wood, an IBM executive, had been dating for three years, having met in a pub where they’d both gone to listen to live music. They were about to move together to Kuala Lumpur. “Until there’s proof Philip is dead,” she said, “I refuse to believe it. If anybody could survive something like this, it’s him.”

In his hotel room in Paris, Ethan Hunt watched Sarah crying on TV and felt a compulsion to track her down, to help. How could a plane simply vanish in the 21st century? It was impossible, but this was the only scenario the authorities had.

This is the story of what happened when Ethan, Sarah and other MH370 relatives finally made contact – six very different characters, scattered across the planet – and set out with the scantest resources to solve the most startling mystery in modern aviation history.

***

Maarten Van Sluys is the 51-year-old executive director of the fourth biggest hotel chain in Brazil, Nobile Hotels. He lives in São Paulo and is talking to me over speakerphone in his busy office, so he sounds echoey and indistinct, but also emphatic and even-tempered.

Maarten had no loved ones on MH370, but his younger sister Adriana died on Air France flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic in 2009. She was 40, on a business trip to Seoul with a stopover in Paris. There was no mystery with that disaster: wreckage and oil was spotted within a day, but it took two years to retrieve the plane.

Talking to Maarten, my impression is of a man who has been through something truly terrible and has emerged from it resolute and considerate. It is comforting, in a way, to know that it’s possible to function again. After the Air France crash, Maarten set up a families’ support group and, when he heard about MH370, wanted to “share what we went through”, he tells me. It was a common instinct: in those early days, MH370 relatives heard from the families of people who had died at Lockerbie, in the 1997 SilkAir crash in Indonesia, at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Soon after the Malaysian flight went missing, Maarten was on a business trip to Beijing. Like Ethan, he had seen Sarah Bajc on TV and felt compelled to contact her. The families of the passengers were being convened for the first official briefings from the airline and government; Maarten suggested accompanying Sarah.

The briefing was very different from his experiences with Air France. “There were military people there,” he says. What surprised him was that their role seemed to be to protect the authorities from the relatives. “The French had a kind of national pride about bringing the plane pieces out of the water. I was on the ship that finally found it. Those on board told me, ‘Maarten, we will find it. We know we will.’”

“Pride?” I say.

“Pride, exactly,” Maarten says. “But it was completely different in Malaysia. Everything was very strange. Psychological support? Nothing. They don’t have any kind of care. It’s difficult for relatives to get them on the line. They seem scared of everything. You have the impression they’re hiding things, and you feel you’re being watched.” He pauses. “They made elementary mistakes. Sending emails – ‘You should think your loved ones might never be back.’ Something like that.”

He is referring to the extraordinary moment, on 24 March, 16 days after MH370 went missing, when the airline texted the relatives to tell them their loved ones were dead: “Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived.”

Protests at the Malaysian embassy in Beijing, the day after the airline texted relatives – 16 days on from the plane’s disappearance – to tell them all the passengers were dead. Photograph: Lintao Zhuang/Getty

“Do you really want to know what it is like?” Sarah Bajc emails me from her home in Kuala Lumpur. “Close your eyes and think hard on this. Imagine that the person you love most in the world suddenly disappears among a cacophony of media mayhem, dashed hopes, false leads, incompetence and dishonesty. Now imagine that your entire life is uprooted and your privacy is destroyed. Perhaps that gets you halfway.”

Over the past few months, I’ve had several email exchanges and one telephone conversation with Sarah. Her pain is right on the surface, and manifests itself in intolerance of my sporadically clunky questioning. When I express surprise that the airline sent that awful message by text, she misunderstands me, thinking I didn’t know about it at all. “Jon, that was… Huh. That was all over the news. I’m shocked.” She says she has always been a fighter: “My mom left when I was seven; my dad was an alcoholic. I’ve been independent since I was 16. I put myself through college. We had to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.”

Like many of the relatives, she has been approached by scores of opportunists: private investigators, psychics, alien-abductee theorists. There were hostile people, too, reposting Facebook photographs of her and Philip kissing with arrows all over them and captions such as: “How can he have red eye but not her? PHOTOSHOP!” and: “His head on someone else’s body. PHOTOSHOP!” and: “Arch-fraudster Sarah Bajc is nothing other than a rabid, extremist Zionist agent, hostile to the bone, bent on spreading great corruption in the land.” These conspiracy theorists are convinced Sarah and other relatives are intimately involved with the plane’s disappearance – Mossad disinformation operatives whose relationships with the passengers are fabricated.

It took Ethan Hunt eight weeks to find Sarah, even though he calls himself, in his online CV, an “experienced private investigator”. He contacted her in May, after a CNN reporter included her email address in a tweet by mistake. Sarah was dubious. “At first I thought it was just another scam. There have been so many.” But Ethan seemed sincere, determined to find answers where the official investigators had none, so Sarah listened.

He told her something about his background. He was born in Perth, Australia. He’d spent time in the military and had more recently managed fitness centres and run software companies; he currently owns a 3D printer business. But he had suddenly found himself – at 55, single and childless – feeling an intense desire to do something philanthropic. “I don’t have any conspiracy theory about where the plane is,” he told Sarah, “but I strongly believe that the truth is not out there.”

I sat at Kuala Lumpur airport watching everything that happened on the tarmac. I can’t believe security is still so lax

Ethan Hunt, photographed in Hong Kong’s business district earlier this month. Hunt helped relatives crowdfund $100,516 for a private investigator. Photograph: Gareth Brown for the Guardian

Ethan looks younger than he is – cropped hair, fit, a bit like Bear Grylls. I’d assumed his was a fake name – it’s the same as Tom Cruise’s character in Mission: Impossible – but it’s just a coincidence. He’s incredibly enthusiastic and fast-talking. When I speak to him, he’s in his office in Shenzhen, a few miles down the road from where Foxconn make Apple products. He has a 10,000 sq ft office here, where he manufactures 3D printers. When business is good, 100 people work for him.

Ethan told Sarah about some of the previous investigations he had carried out in China.

“Like what?” I ask him.

“Well, there was the time an Australian business sent $25,000 to China for some flatscreen TVs that never arrived,” he replies. “So they contacted me through a mutual friend.”

Ethan tracked the missing money to a woman in an apartment building and persuaded two local policemen to “just walk in and pretend they were doing an electricity meter check. I said, ‘I want you to tell me the colour of the walls in the bedroom, any photos, where the sofa’s positioned.’ Then I telephoned her. She just laughed at me. ‘You don’t know who I am or how to find me! You’re an idiot!’ I said, ‘I can tell you right now that you’re sitting on a brown sofa and behind it is a photo of your mother and father. I know they live there with you and your two children and your husband. You’ve got 24 hours to give me back the $25,000 or there will be serious consequences.”

There’s a huge smile on Ethan’s face.

“She couldn’t run away. She knew I could go there at any time. With people. That’s what they do in China. They take 10 people and go and beat you or steal things. I used that mentality. I’ve done it a few times and it works perfectly.”

“It sounds like this is fun for you,” I say.

“Yeah, absolutely,” he says. “China is a bit like the wild west. Seriously.”

Ethan proposed his idea to Sarah: he would crowdfund a $5m reward for a whistleblower who could lead them to the plane. Somebody within Malaysia Airlines or the government must know what happened, he reasoned, and it would take a huge reward to persuade that person to come forward, given the potential repercussions.

Ethan told Sarah he’d already approached the crowdfunding site Indiegogo and been given the go-ahead, just as long as he co-opted some family members for credibility. He was approaching Sarah because he kept seeing her on TV.

“How did you arrive at the $5m figure?” I ask.

“There were 1.7 million people around the world, on Facebook, Twitter, voicing support for the families,” he says. “I believed those 1.7 million people would melt Indiegogo down. We’d get $5m in two weeks, then we could put up the reward and see what happened.” He shrugs.

Sarah didn’t need much convincing. She had no faith in the official investigation and felt the relatives had been misled from day one. She was in daily contact with many of them, and now gathered together a six-strong reward committee. Besides her and Ethan, there was Maarten Van Sluys; French businessman Ghislain Wattrelos, whose wife was on the plane, with two of his teenage children and his son’s girlfriend; human resources consultant KS Narendran from Chennai, India, who lost his wife; and Pralhad Shirsath, an NGO manager from Pune in India, who also lost his wife. (They tried to co-opt some Malaysian and Chinese families, too, Ethan says, but they weren’t interested: ‘They were against it from the start, because they believed the government was doing what it could. In an initial meeting, they asked me to just give them the $5m and go away. The misconception was I was offering $5m of my own money.’)

Sarah and Ethan put together a highly dramatic video, with horror movie music playing over photographs of the missing passengers, and Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak looking evasive. The pictures were intercut with captions: “Incompetence or obfuscation? The truth is out there” and, “It could happen to you!”

“Sarah did the majority of the work,” Ethan says. “She edited it on iMovie. The idea was to look as solemn as possible, like we were contemplating.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The video made by MH370 passengers’ relatives, offering a reward for information

In the video, the relatives hold up cards to the camera. Sarah’s reads: “My soulmate, Philip Wood, age 51, American, father of two, deserves to come home! Please donate.”

“Do you know how many people donated?” Sarah asks me on the phone from Kuala Lumpur. She sounds tense, exhausted, raw. “All of those hundreds of thousands of people who had this huge outpouring of support, shock and dismay? Only 1,100 people. 1,100 people donated.”

The final figure raised last August was $100,516.

“Nobody cares any more,” Sarah says. “Nobody cares, Jon. Honestly. The story’s moved on. This is just one of those things that people will be shocked about, then do nothing about.”

When they realised the $5m would be an impossibility, the committee quickly abandoned the reward idea and decided to use the money to hire a team of private investigators. “We put all our eggs into the PI basket instead,” Ethan says.

Nobody will tell me the name of the firm they hired. Maarten says they chose the least wheeler dealer-seeming one: “People made all kinds of promises: ‘If we have the money, we can bring you anything you want.’ A lot of bullshit.”

“We went with a high-quality firm that’s giving their services at cost, doing a good, old-fashioned gumshoe investigation,” is all Sarah will say. “They’re chasing down leads, talking to people.”

“Are you happy with their service?” I ask her.

“I’d be happier if they’d figured out where the plane was,” she replies.

Maarten divulges a little more: “They’ve brought us details of devices that detect ping signals in the water, and some Malaysia Airlines maintenance reports from prior flights.”

“They’re getting a lot of pushback,” Ethan says. “That tells me people know something. If there was nothing untoward, they wouldn’t get pushback.”

“What do you mean by pushback?” I ask.

“I mean they’re not getting anywhere,” he says.

***

The official search for MH370 continued. In August, the Australian government awarded the Dutch multinational Fugro $50m to search 60,000 sq km of seafloor off Western Australia. The search began in October and so far, 24,000 sq km have been combed, with no success.

Ethan, meanwhile, has been doing all he can. He reads the emails from “the psychics, the ‘Allah’s going to give you the answer’ people”. He “scours forums and blogs for hidden messages. People say things on blogs.” He recently posed a question on a message board for pilots: “What would happen if a Boeing 777 on autopilot ran out of fuel? Would it spiral into the ocean or continue flying?” Straight away, he says, the moderator told him: “You are banned for life. Don’t come back.”

He travelled to Phuket, Thailand, to inquire about buying a stolen passport. “That’s where the Iranians got theirs,” he says. He means the two Iranian passengers on MH370 who were travelling on stolen passports. The authorities raised the possibility of a hijack soon after the plane disappeared, then quickly called it a false alarm: the men, Pouria Nour Mohammad, 19, and Seyed Mohammed Rezar Delawar, 29, were asylum seekers with no links to terrorist groups. But Ethan isn’t so sure. “It didn’t make sense to me that they’d have that much bad luck,” he says. “How unlucky for someone to have stolen passports, then for the plane to go missing. I thought that was bizarre. So I wandered around, went to a few bars, asked a few people. And the cheapest stolen passport I could get was $20,000. These guys were claiming refugee status in Europe! Where did they get $20,000 and the money to buy an air ticket?”

He pauses. “Sarah contacted one of the boy’s mothers and she backed up his story: ‘Yeah, he was absolutely coming to claim refugee status.’ But I said to Sarah, ‘That’s OK. His mother wouldn’t necessarily know if he was doing something dodgy.’ I still don’t 100% believe there’s not a connection.” He admits the men’s seats – towards the back of the plane – point to their innocence. The most plausible hijacking scenario would be passengers in row one overpowering the pilot as he went to the toilet. “But that doesn’t mean the manifest wasn’t altered and their actual seats were at the front in business class,” Ethan says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration: Guardian Graphics

He has also been staking out the runways at Kuala Lumpur airport. “I was in the terminal, in the viewing area,” he tells me, “where the MH370 banners with all the condolences are. For a whole day I sat and watched everything that happened on the tarmac. Catering trucks going in and out without anybody checking, as far as I could see. The next day I watched again. I can’t believe, after all that’s happened, the security is still so lax. I could easily have got down on the tarmac.”

He pauses. “I have a theory. Philip had a thing where he’d always send Sarah a text message from his seat: ‘I’m on board. Sitting down. We’re about to take off. See you soon.’ She never got anything from him that day. There’s no contact phone-wise from anybody after they got on that aeroplane. Nobody tweeted. Why? Chinese people will talk on the phone as the plane’s taking off. I once sat next to a Chinese woman in business class, in the front row, facing the flight attendant, and she was on her phone at the tip of the runway as the plane was about to launch. After she was warned five times, I said to her, ‘Turn off your phone.’ She just looked at me. So I grabbed her phone, turned it off and put it down the side of my seat. The flight attendant gave me a thumbs up.” Ethan smiles at the memory. “But on MH370: nobody. Not one.”

“Wait,” I say. “Are you saying that after the plane doors closed, nobody sent a single message?”

“Before the doors closed!” Ethan says.

“Really?” I say.

“Not one message from anybody on that aircraft!” Ethan looks delighted by my astonishment. “I’ve told the PI to look at this. At Kuala Lumpur I saw how easy it would be for someone to get on to a plane and put mobile phone blockers on there.”

I can tell Ethan is feeling the pressure to find something. “I’m pretty much classed as the outsider,” he says. “The Malaysians and Chinese call me that.”

“You mean the authorities?” I ask.

“Oh, the authorities trust me even less. I mean the families. They haven’t trusted me from day one. In fact I just got an email from Sarah saying people still look at me as the outsider. We’ve been doing this investigation for eight months and they’re still wary of me.”

“Why?” I ask.

“In Malaysia and China,” he says, “they don’t have a concept of charity. They say, ‘Nobody on the plane is related to you?’ It amazes me. Fifty per cent of my life is doing this work. I use my own company resources. I talk to the team members.” He says he is providing his services and time pro bono. Sarah vouches for this, telling me she and the committee have “put many controls in place regarding Ethan’s involvement. To the best of my knowledge, he has always behaved in an honest and upstanding way.”

Imagine the person you love suddenly disappears among media mayhem, dashed hopes, false leads, incompetence, dishonesty

Missing: Passenger Philip Wood, with partner Sarah Bajc. Photograph: Courtesy of Sarah Bajc

Talking to Sarah and Ethan can feel overwhelming: a tornado of facts and suppositions, tech and geography. One moment Ethan is suggesting that the plane landed in Butterworth, before taking off in another direction (“It’s plausible”). Then he’s “thinking along the lines of the Russians”. He’s convinced there is a connection between the disappearance of MH370 and the shooting down of MH17 over Ukraine. “Putin is seriously trying to provoke the west into going to war with him,” he says. “For him a war would be fantastic.” He thinks western governments are “covering it up because they don’t want a world war three”.



“Why haven’t they checked the South Pacific island chains?” Sarah says. “There are 16,000 uninhabited islands in Indonesia alone. A lot of them are small, but a good third to a half are large enough for a plane to land and be hidden under the canopy of a rainforest.”

She, like Ethan, is convinced the plane is on land: “How can you believe that a ghost plane with everybody dead on board can fly for six hours and be totally silent and not show up on anybody’s radar, then gracefully land in the water and produce no debris? There has never been a plane wreck, except for Amelia Earhart, where there has been absolutely no tracking or wreckage of any kind. Never. Not least an enormous plane loaded with stuff in this day and age.”

“If the plane does turn up in the ocean,” Ethan says, “it’s going to have been planted there.”

Their suspicions are understandable; theories like this flourish when people in power behave in conspiratorial or mysterious ways, or simply fail to communicate. But it’s not just Ethan and Sarah who believe this stuff. They got a huge boost in October when Tim Clark, the British CEO of Emirates airline, said he felt Malaysia Airlines were withholding information, telling reporters: “Our experience tells us that in water incidents, where the aircraft has gone down, there is always something… My own view is that probably control was taken of that aeroplane.”

***

I talk to KS Narendran in Chennai, one of the two Indian members of the committee. He calls himself Naren. Every word he says is precise and well-mannered. I realise what a mix of wildly differing temperaments there are in this breakaway group, thrown together by a shared tragedy.

“Some of us are a lot more emotional,” Naren agrees. “Some are driven by reason, scepticism, a certain conservatism, if we can call it that. Some are very focused and upfront.” He sees this as a positive – that all these dispositions can balance each other out and make one clear-headed unit.

Naren tells me about the last time he saw his wife, Chandrika Sharma. She was on her way to the airport. They were about to start building a house in the hills to enjoy in years to come and their final conversation “revolved around construction, payments, scheduling, stuff like that”.

It’s very hard to believe anything that has been put out as fact. The first week there was so much bungling

Missing: Chandrika Sharma, with husband KS Narendran and their daughter Meghna.

Photograph: Courtesy of KS Narendran

It took Naren a while to agree to join the group. He had doubts. “I was very new to the idea of crowdfunding. Initiatives like that aren’t known here in India. And we were so spread around geographically. How would it work? So I started with ignorance and a bit of scepticism.”

I tell Naren what Ethan said – that so many of the families don’t trust him. He laughs. “It’s the general unwillingness to believe public-spirited citizens in this day and age,” he replies. “Walking around in daily life, you don’t come across an Ethan. You don’t just bump into an Ethan.”

“He does seem quite eccentric,” I say.

At this Naren goes quiet. It’s a wary silence. It’s telling me not to insult this man who is giving the relatives something the Malaysian authorities have failed to deliver: information.

“Ethan has so many theories,” I say, “whereas you seem very measured. Which of the theories seems the most plausible to you?”

“I wrestle with this question when I go for my walk,” he replies. “I walk around my apartment complex for an hour every day. My wife and I used to walk together. Now I walk with the company of my thoughts.” He pauses. “Quite honestly, it’s really hard to lean on one theory or another.”

He adds that it isn’t only the theories that are troublesome. It’s the facts: “It’s very hard to believe anything that has been put out as fact. The first week there was so much bungling, or what Sarah calls misdirection. The search kept on in an area when it was quite clear that the plane had actually gone in a very different direction.”

“You mean the South China Sea?” I ask.

“That’s right,” Naren says.

Ethan and Sarah said this, too: that the search teams had spent days hunting for an oil slick that had been spotted in the South China Sea, between Malaysia and Vietnam, even though by then they had radar data showing the plane had doubled back across the Malay peninsula and was never close.

“So I know something was seriously amiss in that first week,” Naren says. “Sometimes I wonder if there’s been criminality, either by individuals or the government.”

I ask Naren a stupidly hopeful question. Amid the misery, does the group ever find itself laughing together, sharing happy conversations?

Naren thinks. “At the end of last year we shared our own sheer exhaustion,” he says. “We shared that, for sure. At times I’ve felt extremely alone, quite helpless. To carry on and make something of what’s left of one’s life has seemed burdensome. And we often share our deep contempt for some of the ways the government of Malaysia, and perhaps the airline, has behaved, with their issues of transparency and treating the families with dignity. But I’m not sure we’ve had a good laugh together. There has not been an occasion to do that. There has been very little to cheer about, let’s be honest.”

***

On 29 January this year, the Malaysian government suddenly scheduled a press conference. Family members rushed to get there. Then the government hurriedly cancelled it, on the grounds that it wasn’t “appropriate” for the loved ones to attend. A statement was released instead: “We officially declare Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 an accident… All 239 of the passengers and crew are presumed to have lost their lives.”

The statement sparked a furious response. Some families demanded a retraction, saying the government had no right simply to give up. The government said it was just trying to be helpful: the families could now proceed with compensation claims. Naren told a reporter from the International Business Times: “It looks like, more than offering closure to families, the government and the airline themselves wanted closure.”

I talk to another member of the group, Pralhad Shirsath, who lost his wife, Kranti, on the plane. Their last conversation had been on the phone. “She was walking towards the boarding gate. She said, ‘Everything is OK. Don’t worry about me.’ Because she was travelling alone.” He sounds utterly flat and spent. He says he thinks Ethan is “admirable” and “outstanding”, but he’s not as active in the group as he once was.



“Why?” I ask him.

“I have two sons,” he says. “I have to look after them. I have to make sure they go to school every day. I have to make sure that I am there to pick them up from the bus stop. I have to make sure that their lunch is ready, their dinner is ready.”

But it’s not only that, he says. It’s the evasive way the authorities have dealt with the committee’s inquiries. “We started receiving the same answers from the Malaysian government, the airline, just repeating the same thing,” he says. “The way they respond to our queries is quite demotivating.” He falls silent. “You feel helpless,” he says.

The way the government and airline respond to our queries is quite demotivating. You feel helpless

Missing: MH370 passenger Kranti Shirsath, with husband Pralhad. Photograph: Courtesy of Pralhad Shirsath

I think about everything I don’t know about Ethan. Why is he so convinced he can unpick this, where thousands of others, with far greater resources, have failed? He says things that indicate a complicated life, such as: “I won’t back away from a fight. I don’t mean a fisty-punchy fight. I’m very skilled at hitting people and I know when I hit them, they’re going to get hurt. I don’t like that.”

In June 2013, Pando Daily investigated claims that Ethan was a scam artist, crowdfunding on Indiegogo for a brand new “Micro-Phone” that was actually just a cheap Chinese phone. But then the man making the accusation – one Michael Gabrill – publicly apologised for defaming him in a blogpost: “I, Michael Gabrill, officially apologize to Ethan Hunt… about my lies and harassment… Please don’t hurt me. I’m leaving you alone. I’m out of work and have children.”

Ethan and I speak soon after the government last month declared the loss of MH370 an accident. “Since then, they’ve stopped the search,” he says. “The official search is finished. They may say they’re still looking, but they’re not to the degree they were.” (According to the Australian government, the search is continuing as normal: “Fugro Equator resumed underwater search operations on 5 February following a suspension due to weather conditions.” Last week, search coordinator Martin Dolan said he expected the plane would be found “between now and May”.)

It is the 11-month anniversary of MH370’s disappearance on the day we speak, Ethan suddenly realises. “I must email Sarah,” he thinks out loud. “When I see Sarah cry on TV, it really breaks my heart. I sit there and think, ‘Why can’t I do more?’”

“Maybe I’m over-thinking it,” I say, “but I imagine that you have to be tough to survive in business where you are. You have to roll up your sleeves. So maybe you’re doing all this MH370 work as a kind of karmic rebalancing?”

“In my life I’ve had to do things…” He trails off. “I was in the military. I’ve had to roll up my sleeves, as you say. So maybe this is my redemption for all the bad things I’ve done. I’m an OK person but I’ve done a few bad things.”

“I was impressed that Michael Gabrill publicly apologised to you,” I say. “How did that happen?”

“He told a lot of lies about me. So I did some investigating. I was able to tell him that I knew he had a family, two children.” Ethan smiles, but it seems a sad, weary smile. “He pulled down his website and I got a public letter of apology.”

“What are the bad things that haunt you?” I ask.

“Everybody has regrets in life,” he says. “I’m a single guy. I’ve never been married. I’ve got no children. I’ve always just done business. So, yeah, maybe this is the redemption thing.”

Then Ethan tells me something I didn’t expect. The $100,516 is all gone. It was spent months ago. “$100,000 doesn’t go very far,” he says. “Initially the investigators wanted $50,000 a month, but we brought that down and paid them a monthly payment for three months. One day in the ocean, to check out one place, costs about $500,000.”

How can you believe a ghost plane with everybody dead on board can fly for six hours and not show up on anybody’s radar?

There’s a little hope, he says. “A Chinese and Malaysian group has started kicking up trouble since the declaration in January. I’m trying to contact them but it is proving difficult. Perhaps they don’t trust foreigners, or maybe just me.”

There’s something else, Ethan says. “Our PI has found out that the pilot asked for two hours of extra fuel.” He cannot show me any evidence for this, and admits that it’s not unusual for a pilot to request extra fuel. He thinks two hours’ additional fuel makes a lot of difference to some of the theories: the plane could have made it to the Maldives or Diego Garcia, the US naval base in a remote part of the Indian Ocean.

Ethan says the private investigation firm is still working for the committee, for free. He had just met with the detectives in Singapore. But they’ll eventually want to start getting paid again.

“How are you going to raise the money?” I ask.

“We’re thinking about maybe another crowdfunding campaign,” he says.

***

Meanwhile the anniversary of MH370’s disappearance is on everybody’s minds. “This case will never be a ‘lifetime’ mystery,” Maarten tells me on the phone from Brazil. “It simply won’t happen. It can’t.” He pauses. “Next year we’ll be less emotional, and more rational, and this will help.”

On the phone, Sarah tells me she’s exhausted by the process. Three years ago, she says, she had found in Philip “a magical gift. I didn’t even know it was possible to have a relationship with someone like that. He changed my life.” And now everything is all over the place. She says her Beijing apartment was broken into two weeks after the plane went missing. Someone tried to get into her safe. People moved things around. And now, living in Kuala Lumpur, her Malaysian work permit has taken several months longer than usual to be renewed.

Sarah is getting impatient with me. She says she’s just not interested in telling sweet human stories any more, about her life with Philip. “All those stories have done absolutely nothing to move us along to the truth. I’m running out of patience with giving up my personal time.”

She’s interested in just one thing: finding MH370. And if I can’t help with that, I can’t help her at all.

I agree with Maarten. I don’t think this will be a “lifetime” mystery. If the plane is in the ocean, it will eventually be found. If it is on land, it would be too huge and bizarre a plot to remain secret for ever. And I do think it’s possible Ethan and Sarah’s investigation may eventually move a rock an inch, and that things will emerge from underneath it. But for now I am a distraction to Sarah.

“Bring something unique to the table,” she says. “Then I’d absolutely love to talk to you.”