Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (CNN) -- Cheng Li Ping is
afraid to tell her sons their father might never come home."My heart can't handle it. I don't want to hurt my
children," the Chinese woman told CNN Wednesday as she waited in Kuala
Lumpur for evidence about what happened to her husband and the 238 others who
were aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Cheng says she cannot bring herself to accept that her
husband is dead, even after authorities announced there were no survivors.
"I can't trust the Malaysian government. I can't work
now because all I can think about is my husband and my children," she told
CNN's Sara Sidner in Kuala Lumpur. "I don't have strength. ... My head is
a mess."
Malaysian officials say they can tell you how Flight 370 ended. It crashed into the Indian Ocean, they'll say, citing complicated math as proof.
They can tell you when it probably happened -- on March 8,
sometime between 8:11 and 9:15 a.m. (7:11 to 8:15 p.m. ET March 7), handing you
a sheet with extraordinarily technical details about satellite communications
technology.
What they still can't tell you is why, or precisely where,
or show you a piece of the wreckage.
All those uncertainties are too much for Cheng and other
relatives of people aboard the plane.
In Beijing, outraged family members marched to the Malaysian
Embassy to denounce the airline, the country and just about everything involved
with an investigation that has transfixed the world and vexed experts.
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The mother of a passenger who was on Malaysia Airlines
Flight 370 cries at her home in Medan, Indonesia, on Tuesday, March 25. The
plane has been missing since March 8. On March 24, the Prime Minister of
Malaysia announced that analysis of satellite data pointed to the flight ending
in the southern Indian Ocean.
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Steve Wang, whose mother was aboard the flight, told
reporters he felt there was "no evidence" that the passenger jet
crashed in the Indian Ocean.
"If you find something: OK, we accept," he said.
"But nothing -- just from the data, just from analysis."Cheng says the authorities' answers to questions don't make
sense.
"They have been hiding the truth," she said.
"Even though they know the truth, they have been delaying it and missed
out on the golden time for the search."
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Australia's Defense Minister David Johnston speaks to the
media in Perth, Australia, on March 25 about developments in the search for the
missing jet.
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Malaysia Airlines says it is giving the families all the
information it can and is sharing it as quickly as possible. And authorities
say they know the news is hard to take. But Tuesday, acting Malaysian
Transportation Minister Hishammuddin Hussein defended the decision to release
the analysis and the heartbreaking conclusions that flowed from it.
"It was released out of a commitment to openness and
respect for the relatives, two principles which have guided the
investigation," he said.
That investigation now focuses on an area of the southern
Indian Ocean off Australia's west coast, where authorities believe the plane
went down after a long, odd, unexplained flight that should have ended hours
before in Beijing.
Searching there resumed Wednesday after bad weather grounded
planes for a day.
Hishammuddin said authorities have stopped searching for the
plane altogether along a northern arc that stretched from Vietnam to
Kazakhstan. Analysis of data by British satellite company Inmarsat and British
accident investigators show the Boeing 777-200ER was heading south at last
contact, he said.
Commercial satellite data from a U.S. company, first
analyzed by Australian officials, as well as satellite data from China and
France, have turned up evidence of debris bobbing in the general area where
authorities believe the plane went down.
Australian and Chinese surveillance planes have both
reported seeing debris on the water, but so far nothing has been recovered or
definitively linked to the missing flight.
Authorities cautioned that despite the narrowing the search
area, it could still be some time before crews find any sign of the airplane.
"We're not searching for a needle in a haystack,"
Mark Binskin, vice chief of the Australian Defence Force, told reporters.
"We're still trying to define where the haystack is."
Search resumes after weather delay
After bad weather halted the hunt for a day, searching
resumed Wednesday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.
A Chinese plane took off for the search area in the Indian
Ocean at 5 a.m. Wednesday (5 p.m. ET Tuesday), several hours ahead of schedule,
the authority said.
Gale-force winds, large waves, heavy rain and low clouds
lashed the search area Tuesday, making it impossible to dispatch surveillance
planes to the scene and making it all but impossible to spot anything from
ships.
"It's a pretty remote area and weather conditions can
get very, very bad, very, very quickly," said Neil Bennett of the
Australian Bureau of Meteorology. "At the moment, we're looking at a good
day today, but we are expecting conditions to deteriorate again tomorrow."
Wednesday's search is set to include ships and aircraft from
six countries: Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Japan, China and
South Korea.
Twelve aircraft will be part of the search, Australian
officials said.
Australia's HMAS Success and China's Xue Long polar supply
ship are also in the search area, officials said.
U.S. equipment to help find the plane's locator beacon
arrived in Perth on Wednesday.
But even with more searchers and equipment and calmer
weather, the effort will still face severe challenges.
The area is extraordinarily remote -- some 1,500 miles from
Perth, where military surveillance planes capable of searching the site are
based. It is also astoundingly large --- some 400,000 to 500,000 square miles
of ocean.
"With eight hours of flying to and from the search
region, the fleet of P-3 Orion aircraft and other military aircraft have only a
precious few hours to scour the search tracks they have been given,"
Australian Defence Minister David Johnston said.
To complicate matters, debris that may have been floating
days ago, when some of the satellite images were taken, could have sunk by now.
Other debris may have drifted hundreds of miles.
And time is running out to find the flight data recorder,
whose locator beacon is
expected to stop working sometime around April 7.
More than half a million square kilometers (193,000 square
miles) have been searched to date, Australian authorities said.
Crash conclusion explained
Hishammuddin spent part of Tuesday's briefing explaining how
investigators came to the conclusion that the plane
must have gone into the southern Indian Ocean.
He said the analysis was based on sophisticated mathematics
calculating how long it took signals from a transmitter on the plane to reach
an orbiting Inmarsat communications satellite.
Much like the horn from a passing car whose pitch rises as
it approaches and then falls as it races away, engineers were able examine the
satellite's signal and determine it had to be moving south, he said.
Engineers checked their calculations against data from other
Boeing 777 flights that day and found their technique was sound, he said.
One mystery remains in the data: The plane's transmitter and
satellite tried to make one final connection at 8:19 a.m.
"At this time this transmission is not understood and
is subject to further ongoing work," he said.
The analysis shows that the plane didn't answer a ping from
the satellite ground station at 9:15 a.m. (8:15 p.m. ET), leading investigators
to conclude the plane's satellite transmitter stopped working sometime between
8:11 and 9:15 a.m.
"This," Hishammuddin said, "is consistent
with the maximum endurance of the aircraft."
That partial ping could be a key detail that helps
investigators unravel what happened, experts said Tuesday.
"I think it's very significant," CNN aviation
analyst Miles O'Brien said. "This is the last time we hear from the
aircraft. You have to wonder what was going on that might have sparked
(it)."
Malaysia has convened an international working group to help
further narrow the search area. It involves agencies with "expertise in
satellite communications and aircraft performance," he said.
It will build on the existing analysis of satellite data in
hopes of pinpointing a more exact location for the plane's location.
What happened to cause the plane to veer off course and
presumably crash into the Indian Ocean hours after it was supposed to arrive in
Beijing remains unknown. Authorities and analysts have speculated anything from
mechanical failure to terrorism to pilot suicide could have played a role.
Police have interviewed scores of people, and the Royal
Malaysian Air Force is conducting its own inquiry into the disappearance,
authorities say.
Anguished families react
The Malaysian government's announcement was met with anger
by relatives, many of whom said it was premature to declare their loved ones
dead before locating any wreckage or bodies. Others accused Malaysian officials
of lying or concealing facts.
Relatives first learned of the conclusion that the plane had crashed via a text message sent to their cell phones. Malaysian authorities followed up with briefings for families in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
"They have told us all lives are lost," a
missing passenger's relative briefed by the airline in Beijing said Monday.
In Beijing, hundreds of friends and family members of
missing passengers marched to the Malaysian Embassy to express their anger and
frustration.
Uniformed police blocked journalists from joining the
protesters as they approached the gates of the embassy. One woman in the crowd,
overcome by stress and emotion, was carried to a nearby ambulance on a
stretcher.
Malaysian officials said they are doing all they can.
Prime Minister Najib Razak explained Tuesday that he decided
to make his official announcement Monday because he did not want the government
to be seen as hiding information on purpose from the families of the missing
passengers.
In an address to Parliament in Kuala Lumpur, he said his
statement was based on "the most conclusive information we have."
Malaysia Airlines said Tuesday it has offered family members
financial support of $5,000 for each passenger aboard the ill-fated flight and
was preparing to make additional payments as the prolonged search continues.
CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told reporters the airline shares in
the families' grief.
"We all feel enormous sorrow and pain," he said
Tuesday. "Sorrow that all those who boarded Flight MH370 on Saturday 8th
March, will not see their families again. And that those families will now have
to live on without those they love."
