Families angry as search for Malaysian flight ends

Three years after it went missing, hunt for Flight 370 is called off

Relatives of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 passengers have expressed anger and disappointment after the search for the missing plane was officially called off.

However, others said they understood that the search – the most expensive of its kind in aviation history – had to come to an end.

KS Narendran said he never boards a flight without feeling terror, and he does not expect that to change without answers to what happened to the plane carrying his wife, Chandrika Sharma, three years ago.

Ms Sharma was one of the 239 people aboard the plane, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean after veering far off course on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

“There’s not a day that passes without spending a significant amount of time thinking about what the state of the search might be,” Mr Narendran said yesterday.

“While it’s probable that we’ll never see our family members again, it doesn’t take away the fact that we would still like to know what happened.”

Li Xinmao, whose daughter and son-in-law were on the plane, called yesterday’s announcement “unacceptable” and the governments of Malaysia and China “irresponsible”, adding: “No matter how much we protested, they wouldn’t take our complaints, and it has become useless for us to protest.

“Even so, I will continue to protest because I just can’t accept the result.”

Nearly two-thirds of the people aboard Flight 370 were Chinese.

Search crews spent nearly three years trawling a 120,000-square kilometre (46,000-square mile) area where the plane was believed to have gone down, an effort that cost an estimated $160 million (£130 million).

They did not find the main underwater wreckage, the black box data recorder, or any sign of the 227 passengers and 12 crew members aboard the aircraft.

A team of international investigators said in December that the plane may have fallen in a different area based on where more than 20 items of debris have since washed ashore.

However, Australia’s transport minister said the new analysis did “not give a specific location of the missing aircraft”, and expanding the search based on that finding would be unlikely.

Mr Narendran said he thought Australian officials wanted to “bury the search” rather than suspend it.

Picture: AP. Flight officer Rayan Gharazeddine on board a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion, searches for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean.