Plane debris found on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion. While the find is being treated as a “significant development” by authorities, experts do not believe that discovery, on its own, will lead search crews to the rest of the plane.

By Kurtis Lee/Los Angeles Times/TNS

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared in March 2014, and no trace of it has been found. The location of the missing Boeing 777 passenger jet remains a mystery to searchers and continued heartache for the families of the passengers and crew, who vanished with the plane and are presumed dead.
Search officials from Australia, China and Malaysia said that if MH370 is not located this spring, they will double their search area to more than 46,000 square miles.
A piece of the plane may have washed up on  the Indian Ocean island of Reunion off the east coast of Africa on July 29. While the recovery is being treated as a “significant development” by authorities, experts do not believe that discovery, on its own, will lead search crews to the rest of the plane.
Still, it’s been more than a year since the plane went missing. Here’s a synopsis of events:

Where the plane was headed

On the morning of March 8, 2014, the Beijing-bound plane departed Kuala Lumpur around 12:20am with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board. The plane’s planned flight path would have taken it north over the Gulf of Thailand and Vietnam, with an arrival in Beijing around 6:30am.

Who was on board

More than 150 passengers were from China, 38 from Malaysia and three from the US. Other passengers were from Indonesia, Australia, France, New Zealand, Ukraine, Canada, Russia, Taiwan, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. The pilot, Capt Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, were both Malaysian. Shah had 18,000 hours of flying time and Hamid had 2,700.
One of the Americans on board was Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive. Another passenger was martial arts expert Ju Kun, who had recently joined the production of the Netflix series Marco Polo, which was filming in Malaysia.

Last contact with the plane

Around 1am, the plane let off a final ACARS transmission signal, which allows computers aboard the plane to communicate with control towers on the ground. According to officials, the last communication MH370 had with air traffic control came around 1:20am, when one of the pilots said, “Good night Malaysia three seven zero.”
Shortly after that, officials with the Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam said, the plane failed to check in as scheduled with air traffic controllers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and all computers that could track its location were deactivated.

How the flight path changed

Based on military radar, it is believed the plane changed course immediately after the communications systems were deactivated. It banked west from its northern path and headed back toward Malaysia and out over the Indian Ocean. US investigators suspect MH370 remained in the air for up to four hours before crashing into the Indian Ocean.
Some theories on what might have occurred

Theories included a possible electrical failure or a fire in the cockpit. Terrorism was also considered, especially because two Iranian men had used stolen passports to board the plane, but it was later ruled out.
Was it pilot error? That remains a mystery. Investigators looked into Shah and Hamid, but because the black boxes that hold flight data recordings have not been discovered, investigators don’t have a definitive answer. In March, a report conducted by Malaysia’s ministry of transport found that a battery on one of two underwater beacons attached to the plane’s black box had expired more than a year before the aircraft vanished. That finding suggests that searchers listening for “pings” from the beacons on the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder never even had a chance of detecting a signal from one of the devices.

The initial search

Search teams began by looking for the plane in the Indian Ocean about 1,600 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia. Pings thought to be from the plane’s black box recorders were being picked up in the area, and a fleet of ships and aircraft were dispatched. Satellites located debris and some oil slicks were seen in the water, though nothing was recovered. After about 10 days searching the area, radar estimates were recalibrated and the search was moved about 700 miles northeast, where it remains.
In January, the plane’s disappearance was ruled an accident. “At this juncture, there is no evidence to substantiate any speculations as to the cause,” Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, director general of the civil aviation department, said at the time.

Status of the search

Officials from China, Australia and Malaysia have scoured nearly 1.8mn square miles of the Indian Ocean. China noted in January that it has tapped “massive resources” to search for the aircraft, including 21 satellites, 19 vessels, 13 aircraft and more than 2,500 personnel.
Underwater vehicles equipped with sonar have been searching a zone of more than 23,000 square miles off the western coast of Australia, an effort that is about 75% complete and is expected to be finished by late spring.
Recently, while scouring the Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast, searchers found a shipwreck. Vessels with towing sonar sensors discovered what appeared to be man-made objects on the seafloor, more than 12,000 feet deep. Further investigation with an underwater camera revealed an anchor and what authorities said appeared to be lumps of coal. The largest object discovered was described as box-shaped and about 18 feet long.
“This wreck is previously uncharted and the imagery will be provided to expert marine archaeologists for possible identification,” the Joint Agency Coordination Center said.
On July 29, an item that resembles a Boeing 777’s “flaperon” was discovered on Reunion Island, which sits off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The “flaperon” would be part of the plane’s wing.
The item was discovered within the 1,100 mile search-area investigators have been operating in since 2014, but experts believe the plane likely went down far from Reunion Island. The length of time since the plane disappeared and the onset of winter in the search area will keep search efforts at a crawling pace, they say.