Day 365 — After one year

The Malaysian Safety Investigation Team for MH370 issued a factual report, exactly one year after the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 went missing.

The 584 page document details factual findings following examinations of ATC radar and radio recordings, maintenance records, cargo information etc.

The Investigation Team is now conducting analysis of the factual information and is considering the following areas:

• Airworthiness & Maintenance and Aircraft Systems;
• ATC operations from 1719 to 2232 UTC on 7th March 2014 [0119 to 0632 MYT on 8th March 2014];
• Cargo consignment;
• Crew Profile;
• Diversion from Filed Flight Plan route;
• Organisational and Management Information of DCA and MAS; and
• Satellite Communications (SATCOM).

The report reveals that the battery powering one black box's locator beacon expired over a year before the incident.

The old battery means that crews searching the southern Indian Ocean likely wouldn't have picked up a signal from the black box even if they were floating right over it. In the weeks after the disappearance, crews searched hastily to try and find a black box before the batteries ran out of power. They're required to last at least 30 days after a crash.

According to the report, an error in maintenance records kept the battery from being replaced. Nevertheless, the flight data recorder would have continued logging data during the flight even if its locator beacon battery was dead. The battery for the other black box, the cockpit voice recorder, was up to date and search crews would have noticed its locator pings had they been in its vicinity.

Day 362 — MH370 search could be scaled back

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott expressed hope missing Flight MH370 will be found, but suggested the search may be scaled back as he marked one year since it vanished.

"I do reassure the families of our hope and expectation that the ongoing search will succeed," Abbott told parliament in Canberra. "I can't promise that the search will go on at this intensity forever but we will continue our very best efforts to resolve this mystery and provide some answers."

Australia is leading the hunt in the Indian Ocean about 1,600 kilometres off its west coast, with four ships using sophisticated sonar systems to scour a huge underwater area. The vessels are focusing on a 60,000 square kilometre priority zone, with the search scheduled to end in May. More than 40 percent of the ocean floor has been explored to date. The intensive search - jointly funded by Australia and Malaysia with a budget of $93 million - has so far only turned up a few shipping containers.

"It's a very expensive search. We want to make sure that when we run over (a possible debris field), we know we don't miss it by accident," Fugro's MH370 search head Paul Kennedy said Thursday. "Because we'll never go back there again. It's a one-shot deal."

Day 360 — No debris, only shipping containers

The intensive underwater hunt for missing plane MH370 has so far turned up just a few shipping containers - and no sign of the jet, the head of the Australian agency leading the search said today. Chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) Martin Dolan said that while several manmade items - mostly shipping containers - have been detected during a sonar search, they had found nothing resembling debris from the Malaysia Airlines jet.

Australian and Malaysian authorities have narrowed the search area to a vast 60,000 square kilometre zone - and they have so far scoured around 40 per cent of it, Dolan said. The ATSB expects the priority area search to be completed in May 2015, but Dolan said it was too soon to say if the hunt could extend beyond then when weather conditions in the remote region worsen. “The decision about what’s next, which is hypothetical at this stage, is one for governments,” Dolan told AFP. “From our point of view... we’ve only searched 40 per cent of it, and our focus is on searching the rest of that area and we expect to find the aircraft there. We just can’t guarantee it will happen.”

The commissioner said search officials have categorised objects they found into three levels - with level one classed as items that have “at least some characteristics of an aircraft debris field”. So far the search has turned up eight “level twos” and more that 100 “level threes”, he said. “The sorts of things we’re tending to pick up are shipping containers,” Dolan said, which are defined as level twos, while level threes are usually geological features.

Day 152 — Fugro has won the tender of MH370's search

Dutch engineering firm Fugro will lead the search of the Indian Ocean seafloor where missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is believed to have crashed, hoping to unlock the greatest mystery in modern aviation.

Australia on Wednesday awarded Fugro the lead commercial contract for the search, after months of hunting by up to two dozen countries revealed no trace of the missing Boeing 777.

Investigators say what little evidence they have to work with suggests the aeroplane was deliberately diverted thousands of kilometres before eventually crashing into the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

The next phase of the search is expected to start within a month and take up to a year, focussing on a 60,000 sq km patch of ocean some 1,600 km west of Perth.

Australian Transport Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said Fugro was selected after "offering the best value-for-money technical solution" for the seafloor search.

"I remain cautiously optimistic that we will locate the missing aircraft within the priority search area," he told reporters in Canberra.

Fugro will use two vessels equipped with towed deep water vehicles carrying side scan sonar, multi beam echo sounders and video cameras to scour the seafloor, which is close to 5,000 m deep in places. Fugro will spend more than $52 million in the next year in the search for MH370.

The Dutch company is already conducting a detailed underwater mapping of the search area, along with a Chinese naval vessel.

"We haven't completed the mapping, so we are still discovering detailed features that we had no knowledge of, underwater volcanoes and various other things," said Martin Dolan, the head of the Australian Transport Safety Board, which is heading the search.

Day 129 — Suspicions of systems tampering

The independent researchers are now drawing attention to data that implies that the jet, with 239 people on board, flew in a circular or complex path for 52 minutes off the northern tip of Sumatra before then flying an apparently straight course southwards for more than four hours before running out of fuel off the Indian Ocean coast of Western Australia.

That previously unrecognized period of 62 minutes of untraced flight begins with a ‘strange’ message from the ACARS computer on board MH370 to an Inmarsat satellite consistent with there having been a temporary interruption to normal electrical power on the jet.

The next, and apparently normal standby signal exchange between MH370 and the satellite 73 minutes later occurs at a point calculated by the official investigation to be only 195 miles further northwest and immediately prior to the jet turning south.

However at the speed assumed by the official inquiry, MH370 would have covered that distance in a straight line in 21 minutes leaving 52 minutes of flight time unaccounted for.