In China, angry kin wants answers on MH370

In Beijing, furious relatives of passengers on a missing Malaysia aircraft are ramping up pressure on the Malaysian and Chinese governments to give them answers about what has happened.

They are threatening lawsuits and demanding to see Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Surrounded by reporters who have flocked to the nondescript Beijing hotel where they have been told by the airline to gather, relatives are lashing out at the media, the airline and their own government for ignoring their plight.

"I really want to see President Xi (left) - I don't know right now what could possibly be more important than the lives of these 200 people," said a young woman who gave her family name as Wen, fighting back tears.

"I also want to ask Mrs Xi, if your husband, President Xi, was on the plane, just imagine, if it was you, how would your parents feel?

"My husband was on the plane, every day my children are asking me about their dad, what am I supposed to do? ... We're helpless, we need our government to support us."

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur early on Saturday and dropped off civilian radar screens less than an hour into its flight to Beijing, a mystery that has yet to be solved.

Another person, who declined to give his name, said a lawsuit was the only way forward.

"We are definitely going sue them. This is really bad. (We are not suing) Malaysia Airlines, but the Malaysian government," he told reporters.

One man from Beijing, speaking to reporters after a meeting between the families and Malaysian diplomats, said it was ridiculous the Malaysians seemed to have no information about even the most basic facts.

"The exact demands were the exact position the plane disappeared at, the time it disappeared, and what happened between the time when the plane was first reported missing and 2.40am," he said, recounting the meeting on Thursday with the diplomats, who left without speaking to reporters.

Plane still missing, M'sia's credibility nosedives

MH370 One of the world's most perplexing aviation mysteries is casting a harsh spotlight on Malaysia's government, as a leadership unused to heavy scrutiny comes under intense international criticism for a litany of confusing messages and a perceived lack of transparency.

Five days after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared from civilian radar screens, a huge international search operation has failed to turn up a trace of the Boeing jetliner that was carrying 239 passengers and crew.

Frustration over the fruitless search has increasingly been directed at Malaysian officials after a series of fumbling news conferences, incorrect details given by the national airline, and a long delay in divulging details of the military's tracking of what could have been the plane hundreds of miles off course.

The missteps have ranged from conflicting information about the last time of contact with the jet to the sharing of photos of two passengers in which they had the same pair of legs.

Chinese satellite finds ‘suspected crash area at sea’

Chinese satellites searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 have "observed a suspected crash area at sea," a government agency has revealed.

The Chinese have released days-old images of potential wreckage in the South China Sea in what is possibly the first indication of a crash site five days after the Boeing 777 disappeared with 239 people onboard.

China's State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence announced the discovery, including images of what it said were "three suspected floating objects and their sizes".

The images were captured on Sunday – the day after the passenger jet went missing – but were not released until today, the Sydney Morning Herald reported today.

Former US National Transportation Safety Board managing director Peter Goelz told CNN that China may have been reluctant to release the images earlier because "they may not want to reveal what kind of satellite capabilities they have".

"It's where it's supposed to be," Peter Goelz, a former National Transportation Safety Board managing director, told CNN's Jake Tapper, noting that there had been scepticism about reports the plane had turned around to go back over Malaysia.

Pilot’s last words: ‘Alright, good night’

BEIJING:  The last radio transmission from the cockpit of missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 was “Alright, good night”, Kuala Lumpur’s ambassador to Beijing reportedly said Wednesday during a meeting with Chinese relatives.

Iskandar Sarudin was speaking to passengers’ relatives and friends at a Beijing hotel. A total of 153 of the 239 people on board the aircraft are Chinese.

The flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared from radar screens early on Saturday without making a distress call and no confirmed wreckage has been found, despite a vast search.

The “alright, good night” comment from one of the pilots came as the flight switched from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace, Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper quoted the ambassador as saying.

As confusion deepens over the search area and whether Malaysian military radar tracked the aircraft, he said “now is not the time” to reveal what information the military had supplied civilian authorities.

He also defended the crew, after an Australian television report that co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, violated airline rules in 2011 by allowing two young South African women into their cockpit during a flight.

Relatives told AFP the event had been “orderly”, in contrast to a meeting with Chinese officials on Monday, when reports said family members hurled abuse at government representatives.

Missing MH370: Phantom Phones Still Ringing Four Days After Mystery Disappearance

AS many as 19 families of missing passengers have apparently been connected to their loved ones despite there still being no clue as to what happened to them.

The mystery of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight is getting deeper and deeper.

It has emerged that phones taken on board flight MH370 are still ringing FOUR DAYS after the plane's disappearance.

Reports suggest as many as 19 families have managed to call phones of their missing loved ones, while the airline itself has got through to some of the missing crew's handsets.

According to Chinese media, the 19 families have signed a joint statement confirming they made calls which connected to the missing passengers but without an answer.

In addition a Malaysia Airlines official confirmed that they too had tried to get in touch with cellphones of missing crew members, but again without a response.

And even more bizarrely, some social media sites have shown missing passengers as still being 'online'.

One man said that his missing brother's QQ profile - a Chinese social networking site - was still logged in.

But frustratingly for all the heartbroken families all messages or calls are yet to be reciprocated.

This isn't the first time that the phones of those people missing were able to be 'reached'.

Plane fine, pilots good, so where is MH370?

More than 80 hours after it vanished from thin air, Malaysia Airlines said that the B777-200ER operating flight MH370 breezed through checks 15 days earlier – compounding the mystery over its fate.

The Malaysian flag carrier had earlier said both pilots were experienced to fly the aircraft, Boeing Co's best-selling wide-body plane, and remain stumped over its whereabouts.

The search for the plane carrying 239 people onboard has expanded as far as Sumatra on the west coast of the Malay peninsula and Hong Kong on the far reaches of the South China Sea but more than 40 ships and as many aircraft have yet to find any trace of the lost passenger jet.

Why is it taking so long to find the aircraft that was last seen crossing the Gulf of Thailand towards Beijing early Saturday morning?

In a special report, the Christian Science Monitor compared the search for MH370 with that of Air France flight 447.

In both cases, there was no "Mayday" or distress call from pilots. The planes just "disappeared" from the sky, the report said.

In the case of AF447, bad weather was a factor.

The Air France pilots didn't radio for help because they didn't realise, until it was too late, the severity of their problems.

And as some pilots have noted, they don't see a lack of communication as necessarily a sign of a terrorist bomb or the catastrophic failure of the aircraft.

How can a plane disappear?

How can a plane carrying 239 people just disappear over the ocean for more than three days?

As puzzling as it sounds in this age of modern technology, what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is not the first reminder of how vast the seas are and how difficult it is to locate something lost in them, said a report by the AP news agency.

It took two years to find the main wreckage of an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.

It also took a week for debris from an Indonesian jet to be spotted in 2007 after it crashed near the area between Malaysia and Vietnam where Saturday's flight vanished.

Today, the mostly intact fuselage still sits on the bottom of the ocean.

"The world is a big place," Michael Smart, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Queensland in Australia, told AP.

"If it happens to come down in the middle of the ocean and it's not near a shipping lane or something, who knows how long it could take them to find?"

To add to the confusion, officials had said that MH370 might have made a turn back towards Kuala Lumpur, making it even more difficult to find as it might have been hundreds of kilometres from where it last made contact with air traffic controllers.

Aviation experts say the plane will be found — eventually. Since the start of the jet age in 1958, only a handful of jets have gone missing and not been found, the AP report said.

"I'm absolutely confident that we will find this airplane," Captain John M. Cox, who spent 25 years flying for US Airways and is now CEO of Safety Operating Systems, was quoted as saying.