Families of the flight’s crew and passengers have called for the search to continue.

“We’ve known this is coming, and I thought I was prepared, but I still feel very frustrated,” said Dai Shuqin, a Beijing resident whose sister, Dai Shuling, and four other relatives were on the flight.

“Suspend the search, to me, means end the search,” she said. “There’s no difference. There was no convincing and solid evidence in the past 867 days, and that’s even with the search. So what can we hope for if they suspend the search now? Nothing, nothing at all. That’s it. This is it.”

A majority of the passengers were from China, with most of the rest from Malaysia.

Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur headed north for Beijing early on March 8, 2014. Investigators used radar and information shared between the plane and satellites to determine that it flew back over the Malay Peninsula, then continued south. They tried to gauge where it plunged into the ocean based on estimates of fuel use and a 400-mile arc along which it was believed the final satellite communication was made.

A small amount of debris from the plane has washed ashore thousands of miles to the west. A wing part known as a flaperon was found on Réunion, a French-administered island east of Madagascar, one year ago. French officials determined it came from the missing plane, a Boeing 777-200. An additional four pieces of debris “almost certainly” came from the aircraft, the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau said. Most recently, a large piece of debris found off the coast of Tanzania, possibly a wing flap, arrived in Australia for examination, the Australian authorities said on Monday.