BEIJING — The families gathered in the ballroom at the Lido Hotel wanted answers. Over a week ago, a jet carrying their loved ones vanished, and for a week the airline executives who appeared before them told different, sometimes contradictory, stories.

“What you say today is different from what you said yesterday,” said one man who had waited along with hundreds of other relatives over the weekend for any morsel of news. Another man said, “How can you still not know after so many days?”

As the world puzzles over the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on its way to Beijing on March 8, the families of the 239 people aboard the Boeing 777 jet have been stuck in a netherworld between anger and grief, clinging to the remotest hope that their relatives might still be alive as the authorities have offered conflicting and confounding possible narratives.

The plane went down in the Gulf of Thailand. No, it might have ended up much farther west, in the Strait of Malacca; the military somehow missed seeing it on radar. No, actually it flew onward for much longer — up to eight hours, in fact. And one or more of the239 people on the plane was in control of the jet the entire time. And now a satellite signal shows that it could be almost anywhere in a broad arc stretching from the Himalayas to Antarctica.

Graphic | The Search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Maps and diagrams showing how investigators are piecing together the path of the missing plane.

The announcement on Saturday that the plane appeared to have been intentionally diverted brought a collective gasp from those at the Lido. But it was welcomed as a positive development. A hijacking, no matter how disturbing, still left some hope that the passengers were alive.

“No news is good news,” one woman said.

Explanations have appeared and faded as quickly as jet vapor trails in the sky. On Monday, in the ballroom where the relatives and friends have been meeting daily with airline employees, one woman said enough was enough.

“I don’t care where I sleep or what I eat,” she said, sitting in a circle of six people with a red down jacket enveloping her like a cocoon. “I just want them to find the plane!”

Chinese relatives of the passengers aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 watched a televised press conference delivered by Malaysian authorities on Monday.

FENG LI / GETTY IMAGES

To say many Chinese are exasperated, astounded or fed up with the way the Malaysian authorities have handled the investigation and search efforts is an understatement. Last week, people at the Lido Hotel lobbed plastic water bottles at Malaysia Airlines executives. Now they are clamoring for the head of anyone who had a hand in what they are calling a tragic farce, from the radar personnel who might have been asleep on the job up to the defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, whose announcement on Sunday about the sequence of events in the crucial minutes when contact with the plane was broken were contradicted on Monday by the airline’s chief executive.

The families of passengers asked one another on Monday the same questions they have been tossing around for 10 days, like “Do you think the Malaysian government is hiding something?” and “Could they have shot it down and covered it up?”

The woman in the red down jacket told the strangers seated around her that her older brother was on the plane. She then turned to members of her own family. “I saw my brother in a dream last night,” she said. “He was on a tropical island. He was in bright sunshine and smiling.”

Nobody said anything. A woman next to her rubbed her hand.

Reconstructing the Plane’s Path

The families in the ballroom have endured briefing after briefing from Malaysia Airlines, the Malaysian ambassador and aviation officials, only to come away with more questions each time. On Saturday, they were told that Malaysian officials were conducting a criminal investigation. About 30 people moved chairs into a circle to discuss what that might mean.

A middle-aged man said the families would stick together until there was a definite outcome. “We will march in the streets if we have to,” he said.

Some airline employees said they would stay with the families until the end.

Tensions in the hotel had been rising. Several Malaysia Airlines employees broke down in tears on Thursday after relentless criticism from the Chinese in the ballroom, which is officially closed to journalists, though some have walked in. At the evening briefing, Ignatius Ong Ming Choy, a senior airline executive, began crying, and a colleague patted his hand. People in the audience kept asking why the Malaysian military did nothing when its radar picked up an unidentified aircraft flying west across Peninsular Malaysia.

The next day, the audience once again assailed airline executives with questions about inaction and incompetence. One man demanded that the authorities publish transcripts of what air traffic controllers said on the night Flight 370 vanished, so the public could check them against the official accounts they have heard since.

Another man asked Hugh Dunleavy, an airline executive, what the military had done after spotting the unidentified radar blip. Mr. Dunleavy said he did not represent the military and had no answer.

By this point, many people in the audience were crying. One man tried to yell out questions, but he was sobbing so hard that his screams barely resembled speech. His hands were trembling.

“We will give these questions to the authorities,” Mr. Dunleavy said.

Another man shouted, “Get the military and the government on the phone now!”

“We requested that days ago,” Mr. Dunleavy replied. “Now we’ll let them know that this is an emergency.”

“It was promised to us yesterday,” the man yelled. “You promised to get the military to call in.”

His voice rose with the others, and the swell threatened to drown everything out.

Chinese leaders are making their frustrations known, too. Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, reported on Monday that Prime Minister Li Keqiang told the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, that his government should be providing Beijing with more detailed data and information on the flight in “a timely, accurate and comprehensive manner.”

On Saturday, the news agency published a scathing commentary in English under the headline, “The fate of 239 lives tolerates no dereliction or selfishness.” The commentary said that “due to the absence — or at least lack — of timely authoritative information, massive efforts have been squandered, and numerous rumors have been spawned, repeatedly racking the nerves of the awaiting families.

“Given today’s technology, the delay smacks of either dereliction of duty or reluctance to share information in a full and timely manner,” it said. “That would be intolerable.”

It went on: “Malaysia bears inescapable responsibility. Other parties that possess valuable data and information, including plane maker Boeing, engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce and intelligence superpower the United States, should also have done a better job.”

Though China and Malaysia have clashing territorial claims in the South China Sea, they have tried for decades to maintain strong economic ties. Malaysia has a large ethnic Chinese minority, and for many ordinary Chinese, the country is a wonderland of beaches and blue skies, one reason that two-thirds of Flight 370’s 227 passengers were from China. But few doubt that this episode has strained the bonds.

“They don’t have the ability to manage the issue,” said Zhu Zhenming, a scholar of Southeast Asia at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences. “Many things have been laughable from the Chinese people’s point of view.”

Mia Li and Bree Feng contributed research.