(CNN) -- An underwater drone dipped into the ocean Friday for its fifth trip to search for traces of the missing Malaysian plane as relatives of those aboard maintained their demand for answers.
Relatives compiled a list of 26 questions that they want addressed by a delegation of Malaysian officials who are headed to Beijing next week to appease their concerns.
Most of the 239 people on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 were Chinese.
The questions include what's in the flight's log book, maintenance records and the recordings of air traffic control when the flight went missing.
Malaysia's acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, has defended his government's handling of the operation and accused the media of focusing on the Chinese families. He said relatives of other nations represented have not had problems.
'The most difficult part of any investigation of this nature is having to deal with the families in our case,' he said.
As frustration bubbles over, the Bluefin-21 was busy scanning the southern Indian Ocean seabed. Authorities said the vessel has scanned a total of 110 square kilometers (42.5 square miles) without making any 'contacts of interest.'
After four dives, 'there has been no debris or aircraft wreckage discovered,' said Phoenix International Holdings, which owns and operates the equipment under a contract for the U.S. Navy.
The underwater vessel takes two hours to get near the ocean floor and another two hours to return to the surface. It aims to map the ocean floor for 16 hours to retrieve data, which then take four hours to analyze.
Deeper dives?
The vessel searches maximum depths of 4,500 meters (14,764 feet). The U.S. Navy determined the seafloor in the search area reaches a maximum depth of 4,600 meters (15,092 feet). Bluefin operators said they can reprogram it to operate at 5,000 meters, giving it more leeway.
Searchers seem to be preparing for the possibility that an underwater drone scan may not yield debris from the plane immediately.
A prolonged undersea search could cost nearly a quarter of a billion U.S. dollars if private companies are used, Australia's top transport official said Thursday.
Martin Dolan emphasized that the $234 million price tag is a 'ballpark rough estimate' of an extended search and salvage mission that includes an underwater vehicle that has come up empty in its first four missions.
Hishammuddin tweeted Friday that authorities are looking at deploying more unmanned underwater probes.
Officials might consider searching along a large portion of sea highlighted by a partial digital 'handshake' between the jetliner and an Inmarsat PLC satellite, Dolan said.
That arc of sea is over 370 miles long and 30 miles wide.
New setbacks
Officials are facing many setbacks in their search for the missing jetliner.
A preliminary analysis of an oil sample collected in the search area shows that it is not aircraft engine oil or hydraulic fluid, Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre said Thursday.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on March 8 after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, bound for Beijing.
With no debris found so far and no possible pings from the plane's 'black boxes' detected in a week, officials shifted the focus of the search underwater.
Air and sea surface searches continued Friday across three areas northwest of Perth, Australia, officials said.
Those searches are probably nearing an end, officials said.
CNN's Ivan Watson, Brian Todd, Elizabeth Joseph, Erin Burnett and Steve Almasy contributed to this report.
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