Paul and Danica Weeks on their wedding day. Danica says she won't stop lobbying for renewed search efforts.

The widow of New Zealand man Paul Weeks who was aboard Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 when it vanished three years ago has slammed the decision to call off the search as "unacceptable and disgusting".

Danica Weeks and the families of the victims were told that the search was called off before the decision was made public on Tuesday.

But despite the deep-sea search of a desolate stretch of the Indian Ocean ending in futility, Danica Weeks has vowed to continue lobbying for further search efforts.

JANIE BARRETT Danica with her children, Lincoln, 4, and Jack, 22 months.

"I was kind of hoping that the announcement was going to be that they would search the 25,000 [sq km], not that the search was going to end," she told Fairfax Media.

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"I won't accept it. None of us will. They won't get away with this and we'll just keep fighting."

REUTERS Malaysia Airlines MH370 pictured during an earlier flight.

Danica Weeks said the plane needed to be found not just for the victims' families but for the sake of the aviation industry, in order to address the unanswered questions about how the plane came down.

"I never thought this day was going to come. I hoped it wouldn't happen this way ... It just can't end like this.

"The Malaysian government promised to bring them home. If they think this will go away, it definitely won't."

STUFF The area in the Southern Ocean where the extensive search MH370 took place.

The Joint Agency Coordination Center in Australia said Tuesday that the search had officially been suspended after crews finished their fruitless sweep of the 120,000-square kilometer (46,000-square mile) search zone west of Australia.

The end of the hunt raises the prospect that the world's greatest aviation mystery may never be solved. For the families of the 239 people on board, the suspension of the search is particularly bitter following a recent acknowledgment by officials that they had been looking for the plane in the wrong place.

"Despite every effort using the best science available, cutting edge technology, as well as modelling and advice from highly skilled professionals who are the best in their field, unfortunately, the search has not been able to locate the aircraft," the three governments, who have coordinated the search, said in a joint statement.

HANDOUT A piece of debris thought to be from the plane was found by a South African family off the Mozambique coast in December 2015.

"Accordingly, the underwater search for MH370 has been suspended."



"The decision to suspend the underwater search has not been taken lightly nor without sadness."

MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Most of the passengers were Chinese or Malaysian and six were Australian.

In December, fresh Australian Transport Safety Bureau analysis - conducted by a panel of international investigators - found the plane likely crashed in a stretch of the Indian Ocean north of the existing search zone.

Paul Kane The 'Fugro Equator' returns to Fremantle Harbour for resupply on August 12, was part of MH370 search operations in the southern Indian Ocean.

With a "high degree of confidence" and using newly available information, the panel concluded that the plane would not be found in the 120,000 sq km search zone and recommended the search be extended into to explore this area.

But the Australian government quickly dismissed the idea, saying the three countries leading the $200 million search had agreed to end it unless credible evidence about the "specific location" of the aircraft is found.

On Tuesday afternoon, the three governments reiterated this position.

Petty Officer Chris Weissenborn RNZAF P-3K2 Orion was involved in the search for MH370.

"Whilst combined scientific studies have continued to refine areas of probability, to date no new information has been discovered to determine the specific location of the aircraft," they said.

"We remain hopeful that new information will come to light and that at some point in the future the aircraft will be located."

Last year, Australia, Malaysia and China - which have each helped fund the search - agreed that the hunt would be suspended once the search zone was exhausted unless new evidence emerges that pinpoints the plane's specific location. Since no technology currently exists that can tell investigators exactly where the plane is, that effectively means the most expensive, complex search in aviation history is over.

There is the possibility that a private donor could offer to bankroll a new search, or that Malaysia will kick in fresh funds. But no one has stepped up yet, raising the bleak possibility that the world's greatest aviation mystery may never be solved. For the families of the 239 people on the doomed aircraft, that's a particularly bitter prospect given the recent acknowledgment by officials that they had been looking for the plane in the wrong place all along.

In December 2016, the transport bureau announced that a review of the data used to estimate where the plane crashed, coupled with new information on ocean currents, strongly suggested the plane hit the water in an area directly north of the search zone. But Australia's government rejected a recommendation from the bureau that crews be allowed to search the new area to the north, saying the results of the experts' analysis weren't precise enough to justify continuing the hunt.

The three countries' transport ministers reiterated that view in their statement Tuesday, noting: "Whilst combined scientific studies have continued to refine areas of probability, to date no new information has been discovered to determine the specific location of the aircraft."

Investigators have been stymied again and again in their efforts to find the aircraft since it vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Along the way, hopes were repeatedly raised and smashed by false leads: Underwater signals wrongly thought to be emanating from the plane's black boxes. Possible debris fields that turned out to be sea trash. Oil slicks that contained no jet fuel. A large object detected on the seafloor that was just an old shipwreck.

In the absence of solid leads, investigators relied largely on an analysis of transmissions between the plane and a satellite to narrow down where in the world the jet ended up - a technique never previously used to find an aircraft.

Based on the transmissions, they narrowed down the possible crash zone to a vast arc of ocean slicing across the southern hemisphere. Even then, the search zone was enormous and located in one of the most remote patches of water on earth _ 1,800 kilometre ff Australia's west coast. Much of the seabed had never even been mapped.

For years, search crews painstakingly combed the search area in several ships, largely pinning their hopes on towfish, small vessels equipped with sonar that sent information back to the boats in real-time. The ships slowly dragged the towfish through the ocean just above the seabed, hoping the equipment would detect some trace of the plane. Unmanned submarines were used to examine areas of rougher terrain and objects of interest picked up by sonar that required a closer look.

The search zone shifted multiple times as investigators refined their analysis, all to no avail. Some began to question whether the plane had gone down in the southern hemisphere at all.

Then, in July, 2015, came the first proof that the plane was indeed in the Indian Ocean: A wing flap from the aircraft was found on Reunion Island, east of Madagascar. Since then, more than 20 objects either confirmed or believed to be from the plane have washed ashore on beaches throughout the Indian Ocean. But while the debris proved the plane went down in the Indian Ocean, the location of the main underwater wreckage _ and its crucial black box data recorders _ remains stubbornly elusive.

- AP, Sydney Morning Herald, Stuff