Malaysia has released to the public its preliminary report on the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The report says officials apparently didn't notice for 17 minutes that the plane had gone off radar on March 8 -- and didn't activate an official rescue operation for four hours.
Bracing for the report
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 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 ones survived have left messages on a conference room board.
"Little Ling, why don't you call home?" one said.
"We're waiting for you to come home for dinner."
Airline urging relatives to return home, paying compensation
Ahead of the report's public release, the airline told relatives it would soon close its support centers at Lido Hotel and "around the world," urging them to return to their own homes to receive updates by phone and other means.
The airline, which has been hosting the families at hotels for weeks, said the Lido center would close Friday, and all others by May 7.
"Instead of staying in hotels, the families of MH370 are advised to receive information updates on the progress of the search and investigation and other support by Malaysia Airlines within the comfort of their own homes, with the support and care of their families and friends," the airline said in a news release.
The airline said it would open "family support centers" in Beijing and Malaysia's capital; it wasn't immediately clear what those centers would do.
Told of the pending closures at a meeting at Lido Hotel on Thursday, relatives initially met the news calmly.
The airline also said Thursday it would begin making advance compensation to the MH370 passengers' next-of-kin, to help with their immediate economic needs.
Under an international treaty known as the Montreal Convention, the airline must pay relatives of each deceased passenger an initial sum of around $150,000 to $175,000. Relatives of victims can also sue for further damages.
The airline didn't say how much of an advance the families would receive.
Company: Our claims are valid
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 it 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."
Analyst: Experts don't support claim
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 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."