Time is running out for the search team to locate the black box, a critical piece of equipment containing cockpit audio and flight data. The box will emit signals for about 30 days, which means the operation has only about a week left to find it before it goes silent.
The search for Flight 370 stepped into a higher gear Sunday. Nine planes — from Australia, Japan, China, South Korea, the United States and Malaysia — crisscrossed the 198,200-square-mile area off the coast of Australia. Crews from some of the planes spotted a number of objects floating in the water Sunday. But determining whether that debris is related to the plane will have to wait until ships locate the items and scoop them up for examination.
Two ships retrieved objects Saturday, but they were described Sunday by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority as fishing equipment and “other flotsam.” Eight ships were involved in Sunday’s search.
On Friday, the operation effectively restarted in a completely different section of the southern Indian Ocean from where it had been looking. The search was moved 680 miles northeast after new analysis by investigators indicated that the aircraft had been traveling faster than previously thought, and therefore would have run out of fuel much sooner.
[READ: Flight 370, a mysterious “one-off,” spurs calls to modernize tracking technology]
Meanwhile, 29 Chinese who had family members on the flight arrived Sunday in Kuala Lumpur seeking answers from the Malaysian government about what happened to their loved ones. Two-thirds of the 227 passengers aboard Flight 370 were Chinese, and their relatives have expressed deep frustration with Malaysian authorities since the plane went missing.
“We have demanded that we meet with the prime minister and the transportation minister,” said Wang Chunjiang, whose younger brother, Wang Chunyong, was on Flight 370, the AP reported. “We have questions that we would like to ask them in person.”
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