Malaysia Airlines says its family support centers at Lido Hotel in Beijing and "around the world" will be closed by May 7.

The Lido center will close Friday, an airline official told families there.

Instead of staying in hotels to hear daily briefings, the relatives of MH370 passengers are invited to receive updates "within the comfort of their own homes," the airline said.


As the world waits to see Malaysia's first report on MH 370, the private company that says it may have found plane wreckage defended its claim.

Fifty-four days have passed since the plane carrying 239 people disappeared on March 8. After intense criticism from relatives of passengers, Malaysian officials are expected to publicize its preliminary report Thursday.

Malaysia has already submitted its preliminary report to the International Civil Aviation Organization, as required. Officials came under heavy criticism last week for not making it available to relatives of passengers.

While authorities are not required to make a preliminary report public, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak gave in.

On Thursday, throngs of police guarded the Lido Hotel in Beijing ahead of the Malaysian report's release. More than 100 passengers on the plane are Chinese, and relatives have been receiving updates from Malaysia Airlines officials at the hotel.

Sometimes, the encounters were marked with screams and sobs.

Relatives who have been holding out hope that their loved one survived have left messages on a conference room board.

"Little Ling, why don't you call home?" one message said.

"We're waiting for you to come home for dinner."


GeoResonance, the company that says it found what appears to be airplane wreckage in the Bay of Bengal, defended its claim -- even though it wouldn't detail the technology it used.

GeoResonance said it used spectral analysis from satellite and plane images to reach their conclusion about the Bay of Bengal site.

The company said it conducted "large scale remote sensing" and detected the presence of aluminum, titanium and copper. Scientists went back to test for other elements that the company says make up a commercial jet.

GeoResonance has faced questions about how it could have found wreckage deep underwater, thousands of miles from the official search area.

"What we say to those people is that that is not about technology, that is about the fact that an object or a combination of objects which produce exactly the same signal as materials used in a plane are detected," GeoResonance Managing Director Pavel Kursa told CNN's Anna Coren.

The company said its search was self-funded -- and wants to keep intellectual property private.

"Our technology comprises of 20 different technologies, and a lot of it is very valuable intellectual property," director David Pope said. "And we are not in the business of just giving out intellectual property for nothing."

The company said its analysis was done by a team of its scientists in Europe. But GeoResonance declined to name the scientists or the country they worked in and declined to give a reason.

CNN aviation expert Miles O'Brien said GeoResonance's claims are not supported by experts.

"My blood is boiling," he told CNN's "New Day." "I've talked to the leading experts in satellite imaging capability at NASA, and they know of no technology that is capable of doing this. I am just horrified that a company would use this event to gain attention like this."

Nevertheless, the company got its wish on Wednesday, when Bangladesh sent two navy vessels into the Bay of Bengal to the location cited by GeoResonance.

The chief coordinator of the international search effort, Australian Angus Houston, held out little optimism that any such search would prove fruitful. He told Sky News International that the search area in the Indian Ocean had been set based on pings believed to have come from one or both of the plane's voice and data recorders.

"The advice from the experts is that's probably where the aircraft lost power and, somewhere close to that, it probably entered the water," he said.

But some aviation experts said officials have little choice but to look into the company's claim.

"The investigators are going to be hard-pressed to blow this off," said Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the Department of Transportation. "I think at this point, because of the lack of results where they've been searching for six weeks, they're almost stuck. They have to go look."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: CNN