Families In Anguish Waiting For News
WHITFIELD: Families of Flight 370 passengers have been demanding answers for three weeks now, tensions have been boiling over and this week, dozens of family members walked out of a meeting in protest. One even accused Malaysian authorities of hiding facts. CNN's Davis McKenzie was with family members in Beijing.</s>WHITFIELD: The trauma of waiting. For weeks, hundreds of family members of those on board Flight 370 have been stuck in a hotel in Beijing. A pressure cooker of grief and emotion. When they were told the plane went down, some via text message, it was overwhelming. Then grief boiled over into anger. These families have banded together and leaders like Steve Wang have emerged. Without physical evidence, he believes his mother could still be alive, but the wait is weighing on them all.</s>STEVE WANG, MOTHER WAS ON FLIGHT 370: It is a hard time, all of us are exhausted, both mental and physical. We just have to wait so it's really a hard time.</s>MCKENZIE: Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gordon Peters has deep experience helping families deal with trauma, he calls the situation terrible.</s>DR. GORDON PETERS, MEDICAL DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL SOS: They're not even able to say let's deal with this, let's discuss it. They still have confliction of is my loved one alive are they dead? The sense of loss just keep perpetuating.</s>MCKENZIE (on camera): Often family members are stock inside this conference room for hours each day, many tell me that they still believe their family members are still alive, even if logically, the chances seem quite remote.</s>PETERS: They go to bed at night and probably logically know it's happening, but they don't want to give up. They want to have the good moments with their life. They want to continue to hope for the best.</s>MCKENZIE: And in a culture where family is everything, they are refusing to give up because the consequences are just too great.</s>WANG: Well, my mom used to say that where there are people, there are family. But one's lost, so it's a disaster to my family.</s>MCKENZIE: David McKenzie, CNN, Beijing.</s>WHITFIELD: The grief of losing a loved one can be devastating, but not knowing their fate can be even more traumatic perhaps. Heidi Snow knows this as well as just about anyone as she lost her fiance in the crash of TWA Flight 800. She started a support group for victims of air tragedies called Access. She joins me now from San Francisco. Good to see you, Heidi.</s>HEIDI SNOW, FOUNDER, ACCESS: Thank you.</s>WHITFIELD: This is clearly torturous for victims' families, at week three now, still no plane, no bodies, no confirmation of plane wreckage, so do you believe most loved ones that are still hoping that there are passengers and crew that are alive?</s>SNOW: I remember so well this point in time, we were gathered at the family assistance center similar to how they are, just holding out hope for answers, some sort of confirmation. For me it took five weeks before his remains were actually found and in that time, I kept going back and forth, I held out hope. All of us at Access, we have got thousands of calls for help at this time, from hundreds of different air disasters dating back to 1950. Everyone goes through this hope phase, the next hour, we hold on to hope and really believe that maybe they are gone, but it's so hard to even imagine facing a life without our loved ones, with a future that's planned and what's really difficult is usually the people who are in grief over this have lost the person that they would turn to during a time like this. So if they're in crisis, this loved one that they have lost is the person they need most. I remember that, really needing him to get through it, yet he was the person that was gone. And so many people say that in our book. I have interviewed hundreds of people and they all speak of the fact that it's so difficult because the person they really need during the hardest time of their lives is the person who's gone. I feel for these families and I just remember being at the site, we had people who were angry, we had people who were sobbing, we had people who were just completely in shock, even this many weeks out because there are no answers.</s>WHITFIELD: Yes.</s>SNOW: And I just remember waiting to hear, did they find my loved one's remains? And the hardest part was we actually had to leave the family assistance center and go home, which is going to happen at some point with these families with nothing. So I went home and tried to resume my life, but I still didn't have any confirmation that he truly was on board.</s>WHITFIEL: Just listening to you reflect, it almost seems as though this new experience, this search, is making you kind of relive everything you thought and experienced as if it has just happened again to you, am I reading that right?</s>SNOW: Yes. I mean, we're finding that our phone lines have really heated up since this first occurred from people from past air disasters who are all reliving their losses and wanting to talk about their loved ones again. And a lot of people have come forward to volunteer and be there for others, because they remember it so well and really want to help these families and be there for them. So it really bringing us all back to day one. And I'm seeing the footage on TV, I really recognize and remember so well what it felt like to be there and just not have confirmation and to be waiting and to be all together with holding out hope, but at the same time, at this time, it starts to dissipate a little bit. And that transition is extremely difficult as well.</s>WHITFIELD: And then, you know, Malaysian authorities admit, they said all are lost, they said that just days ago, if not a week ago, the plane ended, but then today, when meeting with families, officials said they remain hopeful. And are they doing this out of a need of the victim's family members, or does this continue to confuse them or does it indeed comfort them?</s>SNOW: I think at this point, there's nothing concrete, so any kind of answers they're given or beliefs they're given, none of is it tangible. So without any remains confirming that their loved ones are actually gone, and without any physical pieces of wreckage, none of these words really make a difference. They're going to hold out hope right now and then going back and forth on the reality that they could be gone.</s>WHITFIELD: Heidi Snow, thank you so much and your organization, Access, for those who want to check online and hope to get a better understanding of what you and other victims of plane crashes have been going through. Thanks so much.</s>SNOW: Thank you, Fredricka. All right, what happens if searchers find the black boxes from Flight 370 and what happens if they're damaged? Can that vital information ever be recovered? We go inside a lab to find out.