HRABOVE, 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.
The attack on Flight 17 has traumatized the loved ones of the
298 passengers and crew traveling aboard the Boeing 777 from
Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
Eleven days later, pieces of the plane have been moved. Most of
the bodies have been flown to the Netherlands but others are still
here. Fighting has crept closer to the crash site. Rain and heat
have tarnished what remains.
The chaos that followed--disputes over the handling of the site,
fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russia rebels, and an
uncertain probe--has added the worry that families will never learn
exactly what happened.
The prospect offends Mr. and Mrs. Dyczynski, trained scientists
who hold the search for truth as a fundamental pillar of their
lives. They want to identify positively their daughter's remains
and establish her death to scientific standards of proof.
As parents, they are here, determined to see the facts for
themselves. For them, it is too early to reach conclusions. Mrs.
Rudhart-Dyczynski asked: "Who can I trust?"
Fatima Dyczynski, born and raised in Germany until her family
moved to Australia seven years ago, inherited from her parents a
wanderlust of the mind. For the family of three, life had long been
about exploring the limits of human capacity--whether through data
architecture or homeopathic medicine.
As a young woman, Fatima was fascinated with technology and
outer space. She earned her undergraduate degree at Delft and
became interested in space flight, eventually helping design a
satellite as part of a university-funded research project.
At a TEDx talk in Groningen last year, she projected confidence
onstage. Dressed in a black business suit, she energetically
described the goal of a company she founded: to launch a
constellation of nano-satellites that would communicate with
personal cellphones, alerting people to nearby emergencies.
She called herself a futurist. She wanted to go to Mars.
A former classmate, Nir Kalush, said she was the kind of person
who would call in the middle of the night and suggest a trip to
Paris. She was someone comfortable emailing with NASA astronauts or
voicing new ways of thinking about the world and life. "Fatima's
laughter was the loudest in the world," he said.
She was also disciplined. Her mother recalled how she would talk
with her daughter from Australia over Skype, as Fatima did her
engineering work or built presentations. Among other topics, Mrs.
Rudhart-Dyczynski remembered her daughter studying the structural
disintegration of aircraft.
Fatima urged her friends to keep on moving and keep on dreaming
in a July 6 post on Facebook. Two days later, she wrote, "I love my
life. Infinite potential. Multidimensional. Intergalactic." She
finished, "Always remember. Don't let gravity hold us back."
On the evening of July 17, Fatima's parents were sitting on
their sofa in front of a fire when they learned their daughter's
plane had gone down in eastern Ukraine.
Their immediate response was incredulity. "No experts were
there. No one had credible data," Mrs. Rudhart-Dyczynski said.
As hours marched on, the mother rattled off emails to Fatima's
aerospace engineering colleagues, her daughter's acquaintances at
NASA and the family's biologist friends. Could the human body
survive a fall from more than 30,000 feet?
Given that Fatima was a trained hang-glider, could she have
landed safely? Could a passenger fall and then survive in a coma on
the ground?
No one immediately replied. Then the parents packed and flew
from Perth to Amsterdam, followed by Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk and
finally war-torn Donetsk. They decided they needed to find the
answers themselves.
In Donetsk, they found a ghost city, where artillery fire echoed
off the sides of Soviet-era buildings devoid of half their
residents.
An hour-and-a-half drive, through checkpoints manned by
pro-Russia militants, brought them to the villages where the
remains of Flight 17 still littered the ground.
The parents laid bouquets near a crumpled section of the plane's
wing, close to where their daughter had sat.
Roughly 300 yards away, the overhead compartment above their
daughter's seat--20D--rested, just out of their view, in a tangle
of weeds and purple-and-white wildflowers. The Dyczynskis didn't
see the piece of evidence. They only learned of it a day later.
Back in Donetsk on Saturday evening, Mrs. Rudhart-Dyczynski
appeared in a swirl of perfume and energy. She overflowed with
ideas and concepts about the scientific process of investigating
the crash, showing flashes of her daughter's expansive thought
process.
Mr. Dyczynski was largely silent. The bearded doctor stared at
the sunflowers the couple had brought back from the crash site, the
big faces of the blossoms bent in the gloom of a deserted
lobby.
Long before the crash, the family had once discussed how much
time would be required to escape an airplane falling to Earth. "She
would have needed 10 seconds," Mr. Dyczynski said. He asked if his
daughter would have had that much warning, realizing as he spoke
the answer was most likely no.
His wife took out her white Toshiba laptop and showed photos of
her daughter. "You're in for a shock, a good shock," Mrs.
Rudhart-Dyczynski said as she flipped through them. "She is the
most beautiful."
She found a photo of Fatima next to astronaut Leroy Chiao. A
proud mother was smiling behind her. "That's me," Mrs.
Rudhart-Dyczynski said. She promised to replace the lecture Fatima
was scheduled to give at an aeronautics conference this fall with a
panel discussion on the science of aircraft attacks. She hoped her
daughter's science would live on in a new advance.
Mrs. Rudhart-Dyczynski, a psychologist and scientist, said she
didn't want condolences: "I want the facts."
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