UPDATED 8.38am The wife of a New Zealander who was on board the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight 370 is angry the search for the missing plane has been called off, when a new area of its location has been identified.

LISTEN ABOVE: Australian correspondent Steve Price spoke to Rachel Smalley on the Mike Hosking Breakfast

Australian, Malaysian and Chinese authorities have jointly announced the search is over, nearly three years after the plane went missing.

Danica Weeks, whose husband Paul was on the plane, said the Australian Transport Safety Bureau has recommended a new search area 25,000 square metres north of the present one.

"I'm shocked and disappointed and angry all at the same time that this wasn't undertaken. We're going to continue to press that that gets undertaken because the whole thing has been based on assumptions and we have some actual debris here."

She said she hopes authorities "see sense in the next few days" as the families continue to push a further investigation into the crash.

Australia correspondent Steve Price told Rachel Smalley the families of those missing are outraged by the decision to call off the search.

"They have an organisation that they have put together to lobby on their behalf but at some point somebody's got to say, 'look it's just costing too much money and we've got tot pull the pin'. It's very sad for the families but they're probably never going to know what happened."

Price told Rachel Smalley it will remain one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time.

"We will only know discover exactly what happened if, by circumstance somehow, somebody stumbles across something because the official search is now well and truly over."

The plane went missing in March 2014 on its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard.