Families of Malaysian flight passengers want new plan of action

Their hopes raised and dashed, the relatives of passengers on a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner now want an entirely new plan to find the Boeing 777 — after the search was suspended following a new setback.

The 84-year-old mother of Australian passenger Rod Burrows no longer expects to live to see the mystery of Flight 370 solved.

“I doubt it will be in my lifetime,” Irene Burrows said Friday from her home in Biloela in Australia’s northeast. “All I just want is a bit of plane. It’s all I want to know — where they are.”

Tempers flared Thursday after the joint center set up to oversee the search for the jetliner that vanished March 8 said a robot submarine had found no trace of it in a section of the southern Indian Ocean where acoustic signals, or “pings,” were detected.

Investigators have concluded that the area where the signals were detected is not the final resting place of the plane.

The search for the plane and the 239 people on board will be suspended for two months while more powerful sonar equipment is brought in, according to the Australia-based Joint Agency Coordination Center.

“Now they say the pings are not from the plane. It’s March 8 all over again and I don’t like March 8 at all,” said an emotional Jacquita Gonzales, whose husband Patrick Gomes was the flight supervisor.

“We are on a roller coaster ride and we have just hit bottom again,” she said.

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