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.
The search
In a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean, where experts
calculate the plane is likely to have ended up, search and recovery teams from
six different countries are hunting for pieces of debris.
The search resumed Wednesday after stormy weather put it on hold
for the whole of Tuesday.
Seven military reconnaissance planes -- from Australia, China, New
Zealand, the United States, Japan and South Korea -- and five civil aircraft
are making flights over the vast area over the course of the day.
And five ships, one from Australia and four from China, are in the
search zone, Australian authorities said.
Satellites have detected objects afloat in the ocean over the past
week and a half. And Australian and Chinese surveillance planes both reported
seeing items of debris on the surface this week, but so far nothing has been
recovered or definitively linked to the missing flight.
Officials have warned that objects spotted in the water may turn
out to be flotsam from cargo ships, and that finding anything from the plane
could still take a long time.
"There's always a possibility we might not actually find
something next week or the week after," Mark Binskin, vice chief of the
Australian Defence Force, told CNN's Kate Bolduan on Tuesday. "I think
eventually something will come to light, but it's going to take time."
The hardware
If search teams are able to find debris confirmed to be from the
plane, that would help officials figure out roughly where the aircraft went
down.
They would then be able to focus the search under the water to try
to locate larger pieces of wreckage and the all-important flight data recorder,
which may hold vital clues about what happened on board the night the plane
disappeared.
U.S. hardware designed to help with that task
arrived Wednesday in Perth, the western Australian city that is serving as the
base for the search efforts.
The United States sent a Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle,
which can search for submerged objects at depths as low as 14,700 feet, and a
TPL-25, a giant listening device that can help pinpoint the location of pings
from the flight data recorder. Towed behind a ship, the TPL-25 can detect pings
at a maximum depth of 20,000 feet.
Time is against that part of the search, though, as the plane's
pinger is expected to run out of power within the next two weeks. The Indian
Ocean has an average depth of about 13,000 feet.
The wait for answers about what happened to the plane and where it
is now has taken a hard toll on the family members of those on board.
Many relatives of Chinese passengers, like Cheng, refuse to accept
the Malaysian government's version of events.
In Beijing, hundreds of them marched to the Malaysian embassy on
Tuesday to voice their anger and frustration.
They were particularly upset by Malaysian authorities'
announcement Monday that they had concluded that the plane had crashed
into the southern Indian Ocean with the loss of all lives aboard.
Some family members said they weren't satisfied by the Malaysian
government's explanation, which was based on an expert analysis of satellite
data. They said it was covering up the truth and demanded tangible
evidence that the plane had ended up in the ocean.
The Chinese government, whose citizens made up two thirds of the
passengers on board the missing plane, also said it wanted more information
from the Malaysian side. President Xi Jinping has sent a special envoy to Kuala
Lumpur to deal with the matter.
Malaysian officials released more details on the satellite
analysis Tuesday and said they understood the families' need to see physical
evidence from the plane to get closure. They said they had made the
announcement "out of a commitment to openness and respect for the
relatives."
The backlash
The Malaysians' comments appeared to have done little to placate
the anger among the families, though, and it appeared to be spreading more
widely among the Chinese public.
Some Chinese celebrities used social media to urge people to
boycott Malaysian products and visits to the country.
Chen Kun, one of China's most popular actors, accused the
Malaysian government and Malaysia Airlines of "clownish prevarication and
lies." His post Tuesday calling for a boycott was reposted more than
65,000 times on Weibo, China's Twitter-like microblogging platform.
"I've never been to Malaysia, and I will no longer plan to go
there anymore," Meng Fei, the host of one of China's most popular TV
shows, wrote Wednesday on Weibo, calling for others to repost the comments if
they felt the same. More than 120,000 users did.
Chinese authorities regularly censor Weibo posts. The fact that
the anti-Malaysian posts by high-profile users weren't deleted suggested either
tacit approval or at least an unwillingness to wade into the debate by Chinese
government censors.
The legal action
In the United States, meanwhile, a Chicago-based attorney has taken the
first formal legal steps to the missing plane.
Monica Kelly, a lawyer at Ribbeck Law, asked an Illinois state
judge on Tuesday to order Malaysia Airlines and Boeing, which manufactured the
missing airplane, to provide documents and other information.
Kelly is seeking specific information about the airline's
batteries, details on the fire and oxygen systems and records related to the
fuselage.
The filing appears to be the first move toward U.S.-based
litigation stemming from the March 8 incident. The firm said it plans to build
a multi-million dollar suit against the airline and Boeing.
Boeing declined to comment on the matter late Tuesday, and Malaysia
Airlines officials weren't immediately available.
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