It may be their last gift from daddy.
Before taking off on the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner for a new job in far off Mongolia, Paul Weeks took off his wedding ring and watch and handed them to his wife Danica.
“If something should happen to me then the wedding ring should go to the first son that gets married and the watch to the second,” Weeks said, the worried wife recalled.
Then, about an hour after the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur on Saturday, Weeks and the 238 other passengers aboard Flight 370 vanished somewhere over the South China Sea.
“I can’t give up hope,” a weeping Danica Weeks told 9News in Perth, Australia, where the family lives. “I would love him to walk through that door, hold him one more time … I see him everywhere in the house.”
Weeks, 39, is the father of 3-year-old Lincoln and an 11-month-old Jack.
A former soldier from New Zealand, Weeks moved his family to Australia after their home in Christchurch was flattened by earthquakes.
Danica Weeks said her husband, a mechanical engineer, had just landed a “dream job” with Transwest Mongolia and had packed “lots of photos” of his family in his luggage.
Weeks was flying to Beijing, from where he was to take a connecting flight to the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator. He was supposed to return home in a month.
“It’s so hard, so hard,” Danica Weeks told WAtoday.com in Perth. “I mean we are praying for a miracle but what happens I don’t know.”
Weeks’ sister, Sara, said she too is praying.
“I think we’re hoping that it landed somewhere nicely and he’s sitting having a coffee,” she said. “We don’t know anything other than what we have seen on the television, but I think when you put two and two together… it’s not looking good.”
Meanwhile, a Houston man was thanking his lucky stars he was not on that flight.
Greg Candelaria, 57, who works for IBM, was scheduled to speak at a conference in Beijing but decided not to go. He was having dinner with his wife when he got a text about the missing plane.
“We freaked out,” Candelaria told the Houston Chronicle. “Brooke lost all color in her face and a waiter who knows us well came over and said, ‘Are you alright?'”
Candelaria’s co-worker, Philip Wood, was one of the three Americans on the plane.
“I’m personally not willing to give up hope that there’s a chance we’ll find survivors, that we’ll find the place,” Wood’s girlfriend, Sarah Bajc, 48, told CBS News. “There just has to be a chance.”
There has been no communication from the Boeing 777 since it vanished. And the dozens of ships and aircraft from nine different nations that have been searching a Pennsylvania-sized stretch of water between Malaysia and Vietnam have not yet found the missing plane.
Also travelling on the flight was a group of eight Chinese and 12 Malaysian employees of Freescale, a semiconductor company based in Austin, Texas.
Two-thirds of the Beijing-bound passengers were from China.
So far U.S. officials don’t know what caused the jetliner to vanish without a trace, but they have not ruled out terrorism.
