Malaysian officials spent hours meeting with the Chinese relatives of passengers on the doomed plane in Kuala Lumpur today, a meeting that one Malaysian official described as cordial. Prime Minister Najib Razak also planned to travel to Pearce Air Force Base to meet with the team running search operations off of Australia’s coast.
Flight 370 and its 239 passengers vanished on March 8 – 25 days ago – but the search continues to yield few answers. Search efforts for the Boeing 777 started over the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea, then shifted west, north and south before settling on the southern Indian Ocean.
No trace of the plane has been recovered. The current search area is an 85,000-square-mile patch of ocean about 1,000 miles off of Australia’s coast.
Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the multinational search effort out of Australia, said no time frame had been set for the search to end, but that a new approach would be needed if nothing showed up.
"Over time, if we don't find anything on the surface, we're going to have to think about what we do next, because clearly it's vitally important for the families, it's vitally important for the governments involved that we find this airplane," he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.