Relatives of Flight 370 victims to meet Australian searchers

In a quest to better understand developments in the search for wreckage and find some closure over two years after the tragedy, relatives of some of the 239 passengers and crew lost in the missing Malaysia airliner will fly to Australia on Tuesday. The daughter of a missing passenger said this on Monday.

Grace Nathan is among four Malaysians traveling to Perth near the southwest coast port, where the ships that scour the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean for wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are based. Nathan said two Chinese, an Indonesian, several Australians and American wreckage hunter Blaine Gibson would join her group, which will also travel to the search headquarters in Canberra, where a wing flap from the missing Boeing 777 is being examined for clues.

Nathan, whose mother Anne Daisy was aboard the flight that flew far off course on its way from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8, 2014, said the group did not want the search to end in December if the entire 120,000-sqkm search area was examined and nothing was found. Less than 10,000 sqkm of seabed has yet to be searched.

The 28-year-old Kuala Lumpur lawyer said she was interested in drifting modeling work, currently underway in Australia, to define a new search area in case the current search turns up nothing.

“We want to try to better understand what they are trying to do and want to know what we can do to push for the search to go on,” she said.

Malaysia, Australia and China had agreed in July that the $160 million search would be suspended once the current stretch southwest of Australia is exhausted unless new proof emerges that would pinpoint a location of the craft.