Missing MH370: 'How do you lose a plane?'

SYDNEY - For Mrs Danica Weeks, whose husband Paul is among the passengers on board MH370, the most difficult moment so far has been trying to explain his disappearance to their young son.

Concerned that three-year-old Lincoln may wonder at the sudden lack of Skype contact with his father, Mrs Weeks, 38, sat down to speak to the boy.

"You know daddy has gone away... and on the way, daddy got lost," she told him.

She began to weep and found herself being comforted by her son, who has a 10-month-old brother.

"That is okay, mummy," he told her. "I will find daddy."

Her 39-year-old husband, a mechanical engineer, was travelling on the Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines flight on his way to a new job in Mongolia.

Mrs Weeks said she "can't give up on him", but her initial shock was quickly turning to anger.

"You can find your phone in the back of a taxi with an app, so how do you lose a plane?" she told Fox FM.

"Are they actually telling us everything? I am starting to get a little angry around the whole process... I am grieving but, at the same time, I have got this little glimmer of hope."

Mr Weeks is one of the seven Australian residents on a plane whose unexplained disappearance has left a trail of angst and grief in Australia and around the world.

A Chinese Australian couple, Ms Gu Naijun, 31, from Shanghai, and Mr Li Yuan, 33, from Beijing, were returning to China to be with their two young daughters, who are being cared for by their grandparents.

On her Weibo account, Ms Gu posted loving photos of her children for her husband, who worked for a Beijing software company and was frequently away on business.

"Dad, I am playing on the slide now," reads the caption beside a photograph of one of their daughters at a playground.

The families of the missing Australians have expressed appreciation for the goodwill of friends and strangers, but some have expressed frustration at the lack of answers from Malaysia.

The Australian government has sent air force planes to assist with the search, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been in contact with the families of the passengers.

The missing Australians include two couples from Brisbane in their 50s, who were travelling together on a three-week holiday across China that they had been planning for a year.

Mr Robert Lawton, 58, and his wife Cathy, 54, and their friends Rodney Burrows, 59, and his wife Mary, 54, began travelling after their children left home.

The mother of Mr Burrows, Mrs Irene Burrows, said it would be comforting to find some wreckage from the plane.

"It has just disappeared off the face of the earth. And if we could just find some wreckage or something, it would be a help, probably," she told ABC News.

jonathanmpearlman@gmail.com

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