As the mystery around Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 grows deeper, the longtime companion of the only adult American on board the missing flight is clinging to faint hope that he is still alive. Sarah Bajc, an American expatriate living in Beijing, has shared a home in the Chinese capital with the missing American, IBM sales executive Philip Wood, for many years.
She told an interviewer from CBS that the seemingly total disappearance of Flight 370 “defies logic,” but she has appreciated attempts by Malaysian officials to contain the wilder speculations flying around the internet.
“They are sticking to the story that, unless we have absolute proof that something is correct we refuse to release it to you. And I appreciate that approach, the rest of the news media and social media that keep pushing out this false information are really making this an awful roller coaster for those involved,” said Bajc, in the CBS interview conducted by phone from her Beijing home.
“The lack of consistency of information has been incredibly frustrating and confusing. So at first it was hard to know if it was a hoax or not because the official sources weren’t saying anything,” she also commented.
Earlier, searchers looking for any trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 found an oil slick that appeared to be jet fuel and floating objects they believed to be debris from the apparently downed plane. But the seeming leads turned out to be false alarms.
What at first appeared from search planes flying over the Gulf of Thailand to be a life raft was nothing but the lid to a box. An obect that they thought was the tail of Flight 370 was just a mass of logs.
As long as the fate of Flight 370 remains unknown, Bajc refuses to abandon her belief that Phil Wood might somehow turn up alive.
“I’m personally not willing to give up hope that there’s a chance we’ll find survivors, that we’ll find the plane. There just has to be a chance,” she said. “I often felt like we were — like it was just too perfect — how could this happen. You know, you’re almost 50 — he’d just turned 50 — and you find the love of your life, a soul-mate. How could fate have allowed him to come into my life, only to take him away again?”
In Texas, from where the Flight 370 passenger originally hailed, the family of Phil Wood is also keeping faith.
“We’re pretty calm and pretty strong, and we’re hanging in there,” said Tom Wood, brother of the missing Flight 370 passenger. “I’m crossing my fingers that maybe there’s a happy ending to this.”
Image: Sarah Bajc