Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with no signals or warnings of anything wrong. Its disappearance remains the greatest commercial aviation mystery ever.
Here's a look at what we do and don't know about the plane, one year later.
What we know
• We may learn more Sunday: Malaysia's government says it will release an interim report about what happened to the public on Sunday. However, the report — required by the United Nations' International Civil Aviation Organization within a year of an air accident — will focus on the technical investigation but won't draw conclusions about the jet's fate.
• If nothing is found by May, officials will come up with a new plan: Malaysia's transport minister said Saturday that the countries leading the search effort will go back to the drawing board if they still haven't found the missing plane.
• The search is ongoing: Four ships are currently deploying submersibles with sonar to scan for any sign of debris. So far they have scoured more than 10,000 square miles, an area nearly the size of Massachusetts.
• It could take years to find the wreckage: Many point to Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, which crashed into the Atlantic on June 1, 2009, with 228 people on board. Floating debris from that crash was found after a few days, but it took another two years before locating the wreckage and recovering the "black boxes."
• It's officially an 'accident': Malaysian investigators declared the disappearance of Flight 370 an accident in January, clearing the way for families to obtain death certificates and pursue compensation claims.
What we dont know
• Location of plane when it vanished: Air traffic controllers don't know where the jet went. Radar and satellite data suggest it veered west off course and then south toward the Indian Ocean. And some observers have questioned whether satellite pings from the plane during its flight really point to where it went down.
• Debris and location of crash: Not a single scrap of debris has been found despite a non-stop search along the depths of the southern Indian Ocean, where authorities believe the airliner crashed after it ran out of fuel.
• When the search will end: The hunt cannot go on forever, Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss told Reuters this week. He said a decision must be made soon whether to abandon the search or expand it to an even more vast area.
07/05/15 Calum Macleod, Bart Jansen, Alia Dastagir/Associated Press/Katharine Lackey/USA TODAY
Here's a look at what we do and don't know about the plane, one year later.
What we know
• We may learn more Sunday: Malaysia's government says it will release an interim report about what happened to the public on Sunday. However, the report — required by the United Nations' International Civil Aviation Organization within a year of an air accident — will focus on the technical investigation but won't draw conclusions about the jet's fate.
• If nothing is found by May, officials will come up with a new plan: Malaysia's transport minister said Saturday that the countries leading the search effort will go back to the drawing board if they still haven't found the missing plane.
• The search is ongoing: Four ships are currently deploying submersibles with sonar to scan for any sign of debris. So far they have scoured more than 10,000 square miles, an area nearly the size of Massachusetts.
• It could take years to find the wreckage: Many point to Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, which crashed into the Atlantic on June 1, 2009, with 228 people on board. Floating debris from that crash was found after a few days, but it took another two years before locating the wreckage and recovering the "black boxes."
• It's officially an 'accident': Malaysian investigators declared the disappearance of Flight 370 an accident in January, clearing the way for families to obtain death certificates and pursue compensation claims.
What we dont know
• Location of plane when it vanished: Air traffic controllers don't know where the jet went. Radar and satellite data suggest it veered west off course and then south toward the Indian Ocean. And some observers have questioned whether satellite pings from the plane during its flight really point to where it went down.
• Debris and location of crash: Not a single scrap of debris has been found despite a non-stop search along the depths of the southern Indian Ocean, where authorities believe the airliner crashed after it ran out of fuel.
• When the search will end: The hunt cannot go on forever, Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss told Reuters this week. He said a decision must be made soon whether to abandon the search or expand it to an even more vast area.
07/05/15 Calum Macleod, Bart Jansen, Alia Dastagir/Associated Press/Katharine Lackey/USA TODAY
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