By Saffron Otter
It has been 10 years since MH370 disappeared, and still, there are no answers.
Shortly after midnight on Saturday, March 8, 2014, a flight carrying 239 passengers set off from Kuala Lumpur airport and soared into the moonlit sky. But almost an hour in, MH370 disappeared in what is now referred to as the 'world's biggest aviation mystery'.
On board the Malaysia Airlines plane was Daisy Anne, a wife and mum-of-two to Grace and Azelia. She was headed to Beijing to reunite with her husband Nathan, who was working in China.
Before leaving for the airport, Daisy, who never usually shared her feelings with her daughters, called Grace and told her she loved her in a poignant final conversation. Little did Grace know it would be the last time they heard from the mum, and her infectious laughter.
After 01.19am, Malaysian air traffic control passed the commercial flight onto Ho Chi Minh, but seconds after the plane crossed into Vietnamese airspace, it dropped from radar, with attempts of contact unsuccessful. Controls had been turned off, with officials believing the plane turned back before being steered into the southern Indian Ocean before exhausting its fuel and crashing.
Yet 10 years on with no plane wreckage and no definitive answer as to what happened that fateful night, Grace, who was a student in the UK at the time of the disaster, struggles to refer to her mother in the past tense. She says she can't pinpoint a precise moment where it sunk in that she will never see her mother again - because it hasn't.
"While in the logical side of my brain, I have to some degree accept that I'll probably never see her again, but that bridge hasn't been linked with my emotional side," Grace Nathan, now 37, told the Mirror. "So I've actually never said that my mum is not here anymore, that I'm never going to see her again.
"I've never said those things intentionally before. If someone asked me, 'oh, where's your mum?' I'll just say that she's away if someone doesn't know me personally or doesn't know me in any particular way, they'll just think that my mum was away on holiday or that she's temporarily unavailable.
"I still refer to her in the present tense. I speak about her as if she's still here. That's just one of those things that I think that has happened due to a lack of closure. And it is something that I do subconsciously. But I have noticed that I still do it. I'm still unable to bring myself to say that she's not here anymore. It's just been a difficult bridge to cross and fully accept that she's completely gone because there hasn't been anything to accept."
In the days after the plane's disappearance, cross-government efforts were deployed to investigate what happened. With a fleet of 21 aircraft and 19 ships, Australia led the search mission along a 120,000 square mile corridor of water known as the 7th arc.
The cost of the operation had reached 200 million dollars (£120million) by the time the large-scale search was called off after three years - a moment Grace remembers as 'earth-shattering'. Countless theories have circulated online, some more credible than others, while aviation experts and self-declared 'debris hunters' have taken it upon themselves to try and crack the case.
The official narrative, after using military signal data and drift modelling, shows that the plane took a U-turn and flew across over the southern Indian Ocean for seven hours before plunging into the water somewhere between southwestern Australia and Antarctica - an area labelled as the 7th arc.
As the most senior pilot, who worked for the airline for 30 years, commander Zaharie Ahmad Shah was accused of mass murder-suicide after it reportedly transpired his wife had left him the day before the crash, while the FBI found a similar route to the final flightpath deleted from his at-home flight simulator.
However, there's no concrete evidence that either pilot was affected by poor mental health, nor any proof that they were involved in the plane's disappearance. To protect her sanity, Grace, a criminal defence lawyer and mum-of-two, doesn't entertain theories and neither does she have a personal belief about the tragedy.
It hasn't stopped her from thinking about her mum's final moments though, and how harrowing they might have been - as one theory suggests the cabin was depressurised, essentially suffocating passengers. When she heard the news about the plane, Grace was studying for her law exams in Bristol and had to take a 14-hour flight back home to Kuala Lumpur.
"In the early years, it was often in my mind as I was travelling back and forth for my exams, it was very disturbing," she revealed. She hasn't developed a fear of flying, yet the married mum, who only really takes short-distance trips, has become anxious about journeys.
"I have realised I have an increasing trauma with travelling, so most of the time I'm driving, I do have a lot of fear that someone I love, I would lose them in an accident," she revealed. "I think that the trauma is not related to flying, but is related to an accident, having an accident and losing someone."
For the past decade, Grace has been at the forefront of the campaign for another search with the Voice370 group. While she is aware not all of her questions could be answered even if the plane were to be found, she believes it would put an end to conspiracy theories, along with providing a final resting place.
On another search, she explained: "We would be so much closer to learning what happened, why it happened - it would give us some chance for closure. Without finding the plane, we're no closer to finding out what happened. But at least if we find the plane, some questions will be answered, even if not all.
"Even if it's found, the campaign will live on. For us, it's important to find the plane, we have a personal nexus, we care about what happened, and we want to know for our own closure. But I say this time and time again that, until we find out what happened to MH70, we cannot prevent something like this from happening again.
"It extends beyond the need for our closure. It extends to the greater question of aviation safety. Right now, every time you or your loved ones take to the skies, there's always the risk that they may vanish into thin air. That is not a status quo that we should want to live with us.
"I think we owe it to ourselves to demand that. We should all insist on the search for MH370. We cannot be living in this day and age where technology advances at such a rapid rate, but we have lost a huge Boeing-777 and we're okay with that. That is not an acceptable conclusion."
Grace argues it cannot be a matter of money, as the largest number of passengers came from China, the world's second-largest economy. While aviation is a multi-billion dollar industry.
"Money paid out has cost less than a single brand new Boeing-777," she remarked. "For what is touted as the world's greatest aviation mystery, the effort has got to match."
Her father, Pehrinba Renganathan Velayudhan, who goes by the name Nathan, was in a unique position compared to other victim's families and relatives as he is a retired air-traffic controller. The 67-year-old admitted he can't talk about his late wife without getting emotional, but instead expressed his gratitude for those who have taken it upon themselves to try and find out what happened to Daisy and the other 200-odd victims.
At the public memorial on Sunday, transport minister Anthony Loke stated that Malaysia is ready to offer a 'no-find, no-fee' deal to deep-sea explorers Ocean Infinity to revive the search. "I would like to thank Ocean Infinity, it's what we have always hoped for," Nathan told the Mirror.
"There's no guarantee that the plane will be found. But at least some effort is being made - if no effort, no result". When officials initially told Nathan - who met Daisy at university before they married in 1986 - the plane had turned back and there was no sign of a crash, he had hoped she could still be alive. In a cruel twist of fate, it was because of him that Daisy boarded the flight, as she was on her way to visit him.
Unlike his daughter, Nathan, who describes himself as a 'technical person', has accepted she isn't coming home and understood why the search had been called off. Despite this, he has done everything he can, along with Voice370, to keep the news alive.
"When they ended it that day, I knew that there's not much we can do about it. I accepted the fact the search cannot go on endlessly," he admitted. "But there are a lot of other family members who are not prepared to accept that.
"I have good contacts in Malaysia and elsewhere. I'm in contact with the researchers. I've also been in contact with all these independent researchers. I'm well-informed on what is happening out there. We truly appreciate what they have done. And I know they aren't getting paid for what they're doing."
Like Grace, he too doesn't stand by one particular theory, however, says the best outcome would be that it was no one's fault. "No theory is better than the next," he asserted.
"My only condition for any of the theories is that it starts on the seventh arc. Because that is the only tangible evidence we have. So you use that as a starting point and then you work from there. Until the plane is found, you don't know who is wrong.
"We cannot discard any of them. And we cannot say one is better than the other. But if we don't know what happened to MH370, how can we prevent it from happening again?"
He believes without a doubt that one day the plane will be found eventually, even if it's in centuries to come. "Long ago I accepted the fact that nobody's coming back home but we would like to know what happened," he added.
"I personally want to know what happened to my wife, whether she had a peaceful death or whether there was an active pilot and she had a horrifying eight hours. It would be a lot easier to accept if it was an accident. Accidents do happen. And you can work on how to prevent these from happening again."
Life has been difficult without Daisy, who has been sorely missed at milestones, such as Grace's wedding in 2020 - where she carried photographs of her mother on a bouquet of daises, in reference to her name - and longed for her during the birth of her two babies - now 18 months and six months. She goes to ring her mum when she receives exciting news before remembering she can't.
In the last phone call they shared, Daisy declared she loved Grace. "She told me that she loved me, which was rare, very rare, in fact, it might have been the first time she told me that she loved me, especially on the phone," Grace remembered.
"There was a pause, I didn't respond at first. I did say, 'I love you too' and I didn't think too much of it then. But in hindsight, I think it was the single most important exchange that we had ever had."
Today, as it marks 10 years since the disappearance, Grace will choose to spend the monumental anniversary in solitude, giving her time alone to reflect. The mum-of-two, who keeps photographs of her mum around the house and says she will be honest with her children when the time comes, will carve out time for a joint phone call with her dad, who lives nearby, and younger sister, who is a doctor based in Bristol.
They'll talk about Daisy, and what she meant to them. While she was small in stature, she was strong and fiercely independent, Grace says. "A very jovial person. Most people remember her smile and laughter," she said.
Grace wants to keep fighting for answers, not only for her mum, but for the safety of others. "I'm glad MH370 remains in the public eye. It's important it's not left a mystery forever. Beyond my need for closure, MH370 is important for the future of aviation safety," she concluded.
"It's something that we should all take more seriously. MH370 isn't history, it's the future of aviation safety, and today it's us, but tomorrow it could be you."
