Last contacts recalled as search ramps up

Sina Weibo user @RoseMiiiiira said her friend surnamed Wang and his fiance, Gao, were on the plane.

Relatives and friends of the passengers on Flight MH370 arrive at the Metropark Lido Hotel before the news conference of Malaysia Airlines held at the hotel on Saturday. [Kuang Linhua / China Daily]

"We just had a chat in the chat group two days ago. And they called me before boarding Flight MH370 to tell me that the cigarettes a friend asked for are not sold in the Kuala Lumpur airport," she said when reached by China Daily, declining to disclose the full names of the couple.

"Wang had worked so hard to win the approval of Gao's parents and to be engaged to her. The couple has planned to get married this year. My friend is an optimistic and hard-working man. I hope everything will be fine," she wrote.

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China's insurers launched an emergency system immediately. By 7:30 pm on Saturday, the country's major insurers had found more than 70 policy holders on the plane, with the insurance coverage expected to exceed 20 million yuan ($3.3 million).

All the insurers launched 24-hour hotlines and set up a "green channel" to deal with questions and claims related to the accident.

"Once the identity of the policy holder is confirmed, we will quicken our payment process by simplifying the procedure and let the client get the claims first," a spokesperson for Taikang Life Insurance Co Ltd said.

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Wu Peixin, an aviation expert in Beijing, said the search for the plane will be time-consuming. He explained that such operations usually involve large-scale searches by aircraft and ships that aren't efficient.

"Even the surface search radar used by the navy is designed to detect ships rather than small pieces of a scattered plane," he said.

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Wang Ya'nan, deputy editor-in-chief of Aerospace Knowledge magazine, said the signal sent by the flight's data recorder, commonly known as the black box, will be adversely affected by the seawater, making it difficult to find the jetliner.

"Normally, the device is able to transmit its signal within a radius of 10 to 20 km, but seawater blocks the transmission," Wang told China Daily. "After the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 (in the Atlantic Ocean), it took investigators nearly two years to find the recorder, 3,900 meters under the sea, because its signal failed to reach the searchers."

Zhao Lei, Mo Jingxi, Xu Wei and Hu Yuanyuan report in Beijing.