KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Frustration over the fate of Flight 370 mounted yesterday, with gale-force winds delaying the search in the rough and remote seas off western Australia, and angry relatives shouting “Liars!” in the streets of Beijing about Malaysia’s declaration that the plane went down with all aboard.

The bad weather forced a day-long delay by search planes combing a vast expanse of the southern Indian Ocean for any pieces of the Malaysia Airlines jet — tangible evidence for the families seeking closure after more than two weeks of anguished uncertainty.

Although officials sharply narrowed the search zone based on the last satellite signals received from the Boeing 777, it was still estimated at 1.6 million square kilometres (622,000 square miles), an area bigger than Texas and Oklahoma combined.

“We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack — we’re still trying to define where the haystack is,” Australia’s deputy defence chief, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, told reporters at a military base in Perth as idle planes stood behind him.

The weather was expected to be better today for the airborne hunt to resume in the area 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) southwest of Perth.

Malaysia announced Monday that an analysis of satellite data received after Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8 indicated the plane had gone down in the Indian Ocean, killing all 239 people aboard.

The finding did not answer troubling questions about why the plane was so far off-course, and China, home to 153 of the passengers, demanded that Malaysia turn over the satellite data used to determine the plane’s fate.

The airline’s chairman, Mohammed Nor Mohammed Yusof, said it may take time for further answers to become clear.

“The investigation still underway may yet prove to be even longer and more complex than it has been since March 8th,” he said.

The search for the wreckage and the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders could take years because the ocean can extend to up to 7,000 metres (23,000 feet) deep in some parts. It took two years to find the black box from an Air France jet that went down in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, and searchers knew within days where the crash site was.

There is a race against the clock to find Flight 370’s black boxes, whose battery-powered “pinger” could stop sending signals within two weeks. The batteries are designed to last at least a month.

David Ferreira, an oceanographer at the University of Reading in Britain, said little is known about the detailed topography of the seabed where Malaysia Flight 370 is believed to have crashed.

“We know much more about the surface of the moon than we do about the ocean floor in that part of the Indian Ocean,” Ferreira said.

Searching for a needle in a haystack would be simple by comparison, he said.

“This haystack is in the dark, two or three miles underwater, hundreds of miles from land, and in a field no one has even seen before, let alone mapped,” Ferreira added.

The satellite information does not provide an exact location — only a rough estimate of where the jet went down.