Family members of five Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 victims have turned to crowdsourcing website Indieogogo to try to find their loved ones.
The families established the "Reward MH370 Fundraiser" to fund an independent search effort, offer reward money to anyone with actionable information, and to lobby governments in the hopes of preventing another tragedy.
Flight 370 disappeared on March 8 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing carrying 239 people. No crash site or evidence of debris have been discovered.
Relatives of the passengers have been frustrated by what they consider a slow search effort, misinformation, and a lack of communication from government and airline officials during the search and recovery effort, and overall ambiguity as to what happened on the doomed flight.
These issues are at the root of the fundraising effort, Sarah Bajc said. Her partner, Philip Wood was on the flight.
"The official investigation being run by governments and agencies has failed to find the plane, due to either incompetence or obfuscation," she wrote on Indiegogo. "We must work together to ensure the truth is found."
The families also want to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
"On behalf of the 3.1 billion people who fly every year we must find the truth and bring those accountable to justice," Rajc wrote. "We must also prevent this from ever happening again."
The campaign seeks to raise $5 million, and has three "stages."
The first stage of the campaign will reward whistleblowers who come forward with information on what happened to the doomed flight. The second stage will pay a private investigation team to follow up on the whistleblowers' information, and conduct their own search for the plane. The final stage of the fundraiser will use donated funds to lobby governments across the world to adopt changes in "air safety, aviation procedures, aircraft tracking, [and] passport security" to help prevent other families from enduring the devastation that they have experienced.
Donors will receive a type of metal, ranging from iron to rhodium, when they give to the fundraising effort.
The families state that the Flight 370 tragedy is just the latest in similar aviation disasters, and urge people worldwide to help uncover the truth.
"We must also begin to close the security holes that have already been uncovered in this incident, many of which happen to be the same as those uncovered in the Air France 447 incident, and 9/11 before that, and multiple other aviation disasters prior to that," they wrote.
"REAL changes need to be implemented to ensure it never happens again."
