Weather halts search as new satellite spots objects

A Chinese aircraft lands on a tarmac in Perth, Australia, on March 22, 2014. Two Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft from Chinese Air Force left Malaysia on Saturday for Australia to join the search for a missing Malaysian plane in the southern Indian Ocean. [Photo/Xinhua]

China efforts

Chinese President Xi Jinping has sent a special envoy to Kuala Lumpur, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui, to deal with the crisis.

China has employed vast resources in the search, including 21 satellites, over 10 ships and dozens of plane sorties, said Zhang when he met Chinese relatives  of the passengers on Thursday at a hotel on the edge of Kuala Lumpur.

Chinese leaders are concerned about the fate of the passengers aboard the missing plane all the time, said Zhang, who also assured the relatives that China is doing its best to push Malaysia to coordinate international search efforts.

Increasing mystery

Malaysia has been criticized over its handling of one of the most perplexing mysteries in aviation history. Some relatives of passengers expressed outrage that Malaysia essentially declared their loved ones dead without recovering a single piece of wreckage.

Meanwhile, a US-based law firm filed court documents that often precede a lawsuit on behalf of a relative of an Indonesian-born passenger. The filing in Chicago asked a judge to order Malaysia Airlines and Chicago-based Boeing Co. to turn over documents related to the possibility that "negligence" caused the plane mystery, including any documentation about the chances of "fatal depressurization" in the cockpit.

Though officials say Flight 370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, they don't know why it disappeared shortly after takeoff. Investigators have ruled out nothing - including mechanical or electrical failure, hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or someone else on board.

On Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey told members of Congress that his investigators should finish in a day or two their analysis of electronics owned by the pilot and co-pilot, work that includes trying to recover files deleted from a home flight simulator used by Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

And finding the wreckage and the plane's flight data and cockpit voice recorders is a major challenge. It took two years to find the black box from Air France Flight 447, which went down in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, and searchers knew within days where that crash site was.

The batteries on the recorders' "pingers" are designed to last 30 days. After that, the pings begin to fade in the same way that a flashlight with failing batteries begins to dim, said Chuck Schofield of Dukane Seacom Inc., a company that has provided Malaysia Airlines with pingers in the past. Schofield said the fading pings might last five days before the battery dies.

Once a general area is pinpointed for the wreckage, experts say salvagers will have to deal with ocean depths ranging from 3,000 to 4,500 meters (10,000 to 15,000 feet).