SEPANG, March 12 — Malaysia has steadfastly refused to reclassify efforts to locate missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 as a search and recovery mission, insisting today that there is still hope for the survival of the 239 people on board.

“We are still doing the search and rescue,” Department of Civil Aviation director-general Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman told a press conference here when asked if the ongoing mission to locate MH370 would be reclassified as “search and recovery”.

“We still have hope.”

Today is the fifth day since the Malaysia Airlines aircraft lost contact with Air Traffic Control (ATC) in Subang after it took off for Beijing at 12.41am on Saturday.

The plane was carrying 239 people, including 12 crew members and two infants.

Defence and acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein reiterated that the focus for the search and rescue operations is to find the missing plane.

It has been 115 hours since the plane fell off the radar at 1.30am on March 8.

Twelve nations with 42 vessels and 39 aircraft are now searching for the missing plane on both sides of peninsula Malaysia.

“I’d like to confirm that our immediate focus is to find the aircraft, unless we get the aircraft and the black box, it is unlikely we’ll be able to answer a lot of speculative issues,” he said.

Commander William Marks of the US Navy 7th Fleet, who is part of the massive search and rescue effort, told the New York Times that the Navy treats any search operation within the first 72 hours as a mission to find survivors.

“Survivors have been known to make it at least that long, from our perspective, we still hold out a bit of optimism for survivors.

“That’s for that first 72-hour period. After that, it’s the decision of the Malaysian government what they want us to do, and where they want us to be,” he said.

*Corrects a misattribution in the second paragraph in a previous version of the story.