Since the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in 2014, countless hours have been spent scouring vast swathes of the Indian Ocean to locate the wreckage, using search aircraft and surface vessels equipped with the latest technology.
The three official investigations launched by Malaysia and Australia, piecing together evidence from as far away as Mozambique, have so far failed to prove conclusively what happened to the missing flight.
Below is a timeline of the search, from the moments of hope when pieces of debris were discovered, to the devastation after the search was called off with no further sign of the aircraft or its passengers.
8 March 2014: Flight MH370, a B777-200 aircraft, departs Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am local time, bound for Beijing, with 227 passengers and 12 crew onboard. The plane is last seen on military radar at 2.14am, heading west over the Strait of Malacca. Half an hour later, the airline announces it has lost contact with the plane, which was due to land at its destination about 6.30am.
9 March 2014: Search efforts focus on the Gulf of Thailand. It is reported that two passengers were travelling on stolen European passports, prompting concerns that terrorists might have been responsible. Authorities later clear all passengers of any link to terrorism.
10 March 2014: Search efforts scour an area within a 50-nautical-mile radius of the aircraft’s last known position and the northern Strait of Malacca. A Vietnamese plane had spotted a rectangular object that was thought to be one of the missing plane’s doors, but a search in the Andaman Sea finds nothing, and evidence begins to mount that the flight had headed west after contact with air traffic controllers was lost.
15 March 2014: Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, says MH370 was deliberately diverted and continued flying for more than six hours after contact with the ground was lost. Authorities expand their search for the missing jet from central Asia to the southern Indian ocean, and search the homes of the pilots, Zaharie Ahmad Shah and Fariq Abdul Hamid.
24 March 2014: Family members of passengers onboard the flight march on the Malaysian embassy in Beijing demanding answers, after authorities say they have concluded the missing plane crashed in the Indian Ocean with the loss of all 239 people onboard. Many of the families learn the news via a text message informing them: “We have to assume beyond all reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and none of those on board survived.”
24 April 2014: The search and rescue phase becomes a search and recovery phase. A few days later the search moves to an underwater phase, using an autonomous underwater vehicle and a bathymetry survey covering an area around 692km (430 miles) long and 80km (50 miles) wide.
26 June 2014: Australian authorities issue a preliminary report in which they theorise that the plane flew on autopilot after a catastrophic event led to the crew becoming incapacitated, possibly due to oxygen starvation.
28 August 2014: Australia’s deputy prime minister, Warren Truss, says the aircraft “might have turned south a little earlier than we have previously expected”, as it is announced that airline staff tried to contact the flight crew by satellite phone after the plane disappeared from radar.
19 September 2014: It is announced that the underwater search will resume in a remote southern stretch of the Indian Ocean at the end of September.
October 2014: The new underwater search involves ships dragging sonar devices called towfish through the water about 100m (330ft) above the seabed to hunt for wreckage. The towfish, which transmit data in real time, are dragged slowly through the water by thick cables up to 10km long. If something of interest is spotted on the sonar, the towfish will be hauled up and fitted with a video camera, then lowered again.
January 2015: Senior Boeing 777 captain Simon Hardy suggests the missing aircraft’s final resting place is in the Indian Ocean just outside the far south-western edge of the core search area.
28 January 2015: Malaysia officially declares the disappearance an accident and its passengers and crew presumed dead, 327 days after it vanished. It concludes the aircraft exhausted its fuel “over a defined area of the southern Indian Ocean”.
7 March 2015: Malaysia’s transport minister says that if the undersea search fails to find anything by the end of May, investigators will re-examine data and come up with a new plan. The Australian government also says the search of the priority zone where the flight is thought to have gone down is likely to be completed by the end of May.
23 July 2015: Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, says the plane “will be found within the next year”. Two vessels continue search operations in the southern Indian Ocean, with more than 21,000 of the 46,332 sq miles (120,000 sq km) search area already covered.
5 August 2015: Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, says a wing part that washed up on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean came from missing MH370, confirming the first trace of the plane since it vanished. Authorities in France, the US and Australia stopped short of confirming Malaysia’s claim.
August 2015: France launches a renewed air and sea search around Réunion in the hope of finding more debris – it ends after 10 days. The Maldives also joins a regional search for wreckage following reports islanders spotted unidentified debris. However, this debris is later confirmed to be unrelated to MH370.
March 2016: The Australian government says two pieces of debris made in separate discoveries in Mozambique are “highly likely to have come from MH370” after analysis finds both pieces to be consistent with panels from a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft. Darren Chester, the minister for infrastructure and transport, says the discovery of debris on the east coast of Africa “is consistent with drift modelling … and further affirms our search efforts in the southern Indian Ocean”. He adds there are 25,000 sq km of the underwater search area still to be searched.
16 May 2016: The Australian authority leading the search for MH370 says there is a “decreasing possibility” the missing plane will be found. More than 105,000 sq km of seafloor in the southern Indian Ocean has been searched as of 11 May, leaving a remaining search area of just 15,000 sq km. Several pieces of debris found on the shorelines of South Africa, Mauritius and Mozambique are believed to be from the missing plane.
September 2016: It is confirmed that a large piece of debris discovered on the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania, in June was from MH370.
October 2016: A piece of an aircraft wing found on Mauritius, an Indian Ocean island, of is identified as belonging to the missing plane, Malaysian and Australian officials say. The piece of wing flap was found in May and subsequently analysed by experts at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. So far, none of the debris has helped narrow down the precise location of the main underwater wreckage. Investigators need to find that in order to locate the flight data recorders that could help explain why the plane veered so far off course.
December 2016: The families of those lost aboard MH370 comb the beaches of Madagascar in the hope of finding more debris from the plane.
January 2017: The underwater search for missing MH370 comes to an end, a joint statement co-signed by the transport ministers of Malaysia, China and Australia announces. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau had searched a 120,000 sq km area in the southern Indian Ocean, a remote expanse of ocean west of Perth – with waves sometimes between 15 and 20 metres and depths of up to 6km – for nearly two-and-a-half years.
3 October 2017: Australian investigators deliver their final report on the disappearance of MH370, saying the inability to bring closure for victims’ families was a “great tragedy” and “almost inconceivable” in the modern age. The search, despite finding no new evidence of MH370’s whereabouts, helped to eliminate a large stretch of ocean as the location. The report said that meant the understanding of MH370’s location “is better now than it has ever been”.
January 2018: The search for MH370 resumes, after US seabed exploration company Ocean Infinity charters a Norwegian ship under a “no find, no fee” arrangement with Malaysia. A research ship leaves South Africa, bound for a search area off the coast of Perth.
May 2018: Ocean Infinity expands its search, having exhausted a 25,000km “priority area” identified by Australian experts as MH370’s most likely resting place.
July 2018: An official investigation report is released in Malaysia. It concludes the plane was manually turned around in mid-air, rather than being under the control of autopilot, and that “unlawful interference by a third party” could not be ruled out. However, it dismisses theories that had suggested the pilot and first officer brought the plane down in a suicide mission, and also rules out mechanical failure as a cause.
