HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — She couldn’t have known then she would — a decade later — be based in Harrisburg handling media relations for the UPMC hospital chain, rather doing so for Malaysia Airlines in Kuala Lumpur.

And Malini Mattler most certainly couldn’t have imagined — just as no one in the world who learned what she learned March 8, 2014, could have imagined — that a decade later, the world would soon have so little idea where the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was, let alone what caused it to disappear.

All she knew then, when a phone call awakened her at 5 a.m. local time: Something bad had happened. Her manager asked her to rush to the airline’s emergency operations center, or EOC.

“I did not ask many questions because we were trained that if we get that call, we are getting out and getting to the EOC ASAP,” Mattler recalled.

What’s that smell? Invasive pear trees blooming in Pennsylvania now banned

Her manager did give her the quick summary: A flight on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing had vanished from radar.

Ominous, for sure, but still “there was some hope that maybe that plane lost contact, but it’s going to reach its destination at 6:30 a.m. in the morning in Beijing,” said Mattler, who was known then by her maiden name, Malini Saudranrajan.

But 6:30 a.m. came and went, and by shortly after 7 a.m., it was her team’s responsibility to tell the world the plane was gone, and the airline didn’t know where it was.

“In the beginning, Seth, it was more like, ‘Okay, we have lost contact with this plane. It has probably crashed, and we are going to find it,” Mattler said.

Then days, then weeks, and still no sign of the plane. The crisis communications team thought they had trained for every possibility, Matter said, but they had never trained for something like this, because nothing like this had ever happened.

On one hand, she was closer to the crisis than almost anyone else in the world, but on the other hand, that proximity kept her somewhat emotionally detached.

“For the [first] 24 hours, I was just focused on this aircraft,” she said. “But when I read those stories about how someone’s parents were on board and how, you know, someone’s child…. And China had its one-child policy, which meant a lot of those people on the plane were the only child for most of their parents.”

Mattler spent most waking hours for a month at the EOC and calls the crisis “the most difficult, the most challenging, the most heartbreaking thing I’ve worked on in my entire communications career.”

The majority of the 227 passengers were Chinese; they were presumed dead along with the 12 Malaysian crewmembers.

Close

Thanks for signing up!

Watch for us in your inbox.

Subscribe Now

Breaking News

Experts have dismissed some implausible conspiracy theories about what happened to the plane. Among more credible possibilities, a technical problem seemed unlikely, because of how the aircraft seemed to make a sudden and deliberate turn before ground controllers lost contact with it, and because of how its communications equipmet seemed to be turned off intentionally.

Types of foul play that could have occurred included hijacking or sabotage by a crewmember; MH370’s captain’s flight simulator activities at home raised suspicions. In a few other incidents in commercial aviation history — such as the crashes of Egyptair flight 990 in 1999 and Germanwings flight 9525 in 2015 — investigators concluded a pilot intentionally crashed the aircraft, killing everybody aboard. But in both of those cases, unlike in the case of MH370, the investigators had the benefit of wreckage and cockpit voice and data recorders to supplement other evidence.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC27.