LATEST DEVELOPMENT
• The search for the downed airliner is expected to resume today after a delay because of bad weather.
• Searchers are hoping to pick up a signal from the pinger embedded with the plane’s black boxes before its battery runs out. But the search area, in ocean depths exceeding four miles, is anything but precise, covering an area as big as Texas and Oklahoma combined.
• Frustrated Chinese relatives of the victims denounced the Malaysian government’s conclusion that the plane, and all aboard, had been lost, and demonstrated in front of the Malaysian embassy in Beijing.
News services
Frustration over the fate of Flight 370 mounted Tuesday, with gale-force winds delaying the search in the rough and remote seas off western Australia.
Relatives of the victims, refusing to believe Malaysia’s declaration that the plane went down with all aboard, shouted “Liars!” in the streets of Beijing.
The weather had improved by this morning, and 12 planes and two ships from the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand were scheduled to resume the hunt in a vast expanse of the southern Indian Ocean.
The bad weather forced a daylong delay Tuesday by search planes searching for any pieces of the Malaysia Airlines jet — tangible evidence for the families seeking closure after more than two weeks of anguished uncertainty.
Although officials sharply narrowed the search zone based on the last satellite signals received from the Boeing 777, it was still estimated at 622,000 square miles, an area bigger than Texas and Oklahoma combined.
“We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack — we’re still trying to define where the haystack is,” Australia’s deputy defense chief, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, told reporters at a military base in the Australian west coast city of Perth.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which coordinates the search on Malaysia’s behalf, said today’s search would focus on 30,900 square miles of ocean. The search area is more than 1,000 miles southwest of Perth.
Malaysia announced Monday that an analysis of satellite data received after Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8 indicated the plane had gone down in the Indian Ocean, killing all 239 people aboard. The finding did not answer troubling questions about why the plane was so far off course, and China, home to 153 of the passengers, demanded that Malaysia turn over the satellite data used to determine the plane’s fate.
The airline’s chairman, Mohammed Nor Mohammed Yusof, said it may take time for further answers to become clear.
“The investigation still underway may yet prove to be even longer and more complex than it has been since March 8th,” he said.
The search for the wreckage and the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders could take years in a stretch of sea where depths in some places exceed four miles. It took two years to find the black box from an Air France jet that went down in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, though searchers knew within days where the crash site was.
There is a race against the clock to find Flight 370’s black boxes, whose battery-powered “pinger” could stop sending signals within two weeks as the batteries run out.
David Ferreira, an oceanographer at the University of Reading in Britain, said little is known about the topography of the seabed where Malaysia Flight 370 is believed to have crashed.
“We know much more about the surface of the moon than we do about the ocean floor in that part of the Indian Ocean,” Ferreira said.
Searching for a needle in a haystack would be simple by comparison, he said.
“This haystack is in the dark, two or three miles underwater, hundreds of miles from land, and in a field no one has even seen before, let alone mapped,” Ferreira said.
The satellite information does not provide an exact location — only a rough estimate of where the jet went down.
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\Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the data is still being analyzed “to attempt to determine the final position of the aircraft.”
Monday’s announcement that there were no survivors unleashed sorrow and anger among the victims’ families, who have complained bitterly about a lack of reliable information from Malaysian officials.
Nearly 100 relatives and their supporters marched Tuesday to the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing, where they threw plastic water bottles, tried to rush the gate and chanted, “Liars!”
Many wore white T-shirts that read “Let’s pray for MH370.” Holding banners, they shouted, “Tell the truth! Return our relatives!”
In a clear statement of support for the families, Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered a special envoy, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui, to Kuala Lumpur to deal with the case. Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng told Malaysia’s ambassador that China wanted to know exactly what led Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak to announce that the plane had been lost, a statement on the ministry’s website said.
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