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Journalism

Two Outstanding MH17 Features

2014 07 30MH17

I’m back in Singapore after helping with our Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 coverage from Kuala Lumpur.

Here are two especially great features, produced by my WSJ colleagues, that I wanted to point out:

First, there’s this moving story from Sunday about parents — whose only child was aboard Flight 17 — visiting the crash site in Ukraine:

Angela Rudhart-Dyczynski slipped off her shoes, covered her feet in white socks and crunched through a field tinged with the sick-sweet smell of death to reach a wing of downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

She and her husband arrived Saturday from Australia after an exhausting three-day journey that left her feet too swollen for shoes. They braved this war zone in search of a lost passenger: Fatima, their only child.

“We’re standing here at the wing in the field,” Jerzy Dyczynski, a cardiologist, said into his phone, as the wind blew. “This is where we thought she was sitting. We’re trying to picture her.”

Among the locusts and wildflowers, images of their daughter, a 25-year-old aerospace engineering graduate student at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who had been on her way home for a visit, overwhelmed them.

They knew where they were, but they still couldn’t believe it. “We’re lost,” Mr. Dyczynski said.

Second, don’t miss this interactive feature with a map showing how, exactly, the plane came apart and where its wreckage was strewn over Ukraine.

Above is a screen shot; click through for more.

Categories
Journalism

My Story Today on the Aviation Community’s Social Media Tributes to MH17 Victims

You can find it here

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Journalism

Me on WSJ Live Talking about Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

Online here and embedded above is a video segment I did with my WSJ colleague Ramy Inocencio earlier today.

I’m here in Kuala Lumpur helping with our coverage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which crashed Thursday in the east Ukraine region of Donetsk — just a few months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing.

For updates, keep an eye on our home page, our streaming updates page, and follow me on Twitter.

Stay tuned.

Categories
Journalism

How I’ve helped with our Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 coverage

Yesterday marked three weeks since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing.

For the latest news, keep an eye on our streaming MH370 updates.

Meanwhile, I spent some in time Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere helping with our coverage, and wanted to share a few of the stories I worked on.

First, I helped out with an in-depth narrative piece telling the stories of some of the people on board on the flight.

The story begins:

As night fell last Friday in Kuala Lumpur, businessman Philip Wood hurried to gather his bags for a trip to Beijing. He had confused the dates, but his girlfriend in China texted him to make sure he got on the plane.

A group of Chinese artists capped off their exhibition at a local cultural center in Malaysia’s capital city with a day of sightseeing and a banquet lunch of duck soup, fried shrimp and pork in brown sauce.

Norli Akmar Hamid finished packing for her long-overdue honeymoon and posted a photograph on Facebook of her cat trying to sneak into her suitcase. The cat chewed the lining near the administrative assistant’s neatly folded blue T-shirt and beige towel.

All of them boarded Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU -2.08% Flight 370 late Friday night and flew away shortly after midnight in the tropical night sky toward Beijing. Soon after, the widebody Boeing 777 jet carrying 239 people vanished from radar screens.

The flight manifest included Americans, Australians, Indians and passengers from a host of other countries. There were more than 150 Chinese on board, many of them tourists who belong to China’s burgeoning middle class. A country between Thailand and Singapore, Malaysia has emerged in recent years as a major transit hub and tourist destination for globe-trotting travelers.

Flight 370 took off carrying 239 life stories, each filled with moments big and small, ordinary lives soon to be swept up in a tragic mystery. Now, as the hopes for a miracle fade by the day, memory transforms the random and routine into the meaningful and momentous.

I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Separately, I wrote a short piece on pilots and aviation buffs sharing their musings on Flight 370 via blogs, Facebook, Tweets, and more.

I also helped with a story about chaotic scenes as Chinese relatives of missing passengers were separated from the media by security personnel.

In the video embedded at the top of this post and on YouTube here, I discussed the scene and some video I shot.

And finally, in the video embedded above and on YouTube here, I participated in a live Google Hangout with our Southeast Asia Bureau Chief, Patrick McDowell, and aviation expert Harro Ranter to answer readers’ questions about Flight 370.

Stay tuned.

And if you don’t already, follow me on Twitter, as I’ve been posting frequently Flight 370-related updates there.