At the airport, 227 of them waited to board an early morning flight to Beijing. Friends chatted while parents held sleepy children on their laps. Some were leaving for a trip. Others had finished theirs and were returning home.

On the plane, the 12 members of the cabin crew made preparations for the flight. Carry-on luggage was stowed in overhead compartments, seatbelts were buckled and safety announcements were made.

At 12.41am, the plane took off. No one knew then that it would never reach its destination.

Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370 disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to Beijing’s Capital International Airport. The Boeing 777 vanished from radar somewhere over the South China Sea. Its last message, “Good night. Malaysian Three Seven Zero,” was transmitted at 1.19am.

Military radar continued to track the aircraft as it deviated west of its scheduled flight path. But at 2.22am, some 370km northwest of Penang, MH370 disappeared from military radar as well. Investigators believe it turned south around the edge of Indonesia and headed across the Indian Ocean.

After that, no one can say for sure what happened. The flight was supposed to land in Beijing at around 6.30am. It never did.

The disappearance sparked the largest and most expensive search operation in aviation history. Led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), search teams scoured 120,000 sq km of the southern Indian Ocean using tethered underwater vehicles, but to no avail.

Family members responded with shock, outrage and grief. Most of the passengers had been Chinese citizens, and their relatives accused Malaysian authorities of being shoddy in crisis management.

On Jan 29, 2015, Malaysia officially declared MH370 lost in an accident, clearing the way for MAS to begin paying compensation to relatives. Everyone on board was presumed dead.

Search teams continued sweeping the ocean for clues to the plane’s whereabouts, but it wasn’t until six months later that authorities received the first sign of wreckage.

On July 29, a 2.7-metre flaperon, a part of the wing used to increase drag for take-off and landing, washed up on a beach on Reunion island, east of Madagascar and southwest of Mauritius.

Then on Dec 27, a flap track fairing segment, which shields the wing flap and reduces drag, turned up in Mozambique. The piece was sent to ATSB investigators in Canberra for examination.

Between February and June 2016, more pieces of debris were found at various locations in Mozambique, South Africa, Mauritius and Zanzibar, lending hope that investigators were looking in the right place. Experts concluded that at least three pieces had come from the missing airliner.

In December, ATSB said more than 20 pieces of debris had been recovered and identified as almost certainly or definitely originating from MH370.

So far, all debris from the aircraft has been found in East Africa.

But on Dec 20, family members were dealt another blow when ATSB released a report saying that the search mission had been looking for MH370 in the wrong place.

The report, which took into account input from experts in data processing, satellite communications, accident investigation, aircraft performance, flight operations, sonar data, acoustic data and oceanography, said there was “a high degree of certainty” that MH370 was not in the search zone.

It instead identified a new area north of the official search zone, approximately 25,000 sq km in size, as “the area with the highest probability of containing the wreckage of the aircraft”.

The ATSB findings coincided with those of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which released its own report on oceanographic drift modelling as part of the ATSB review.

The CSIRO report confirmed that the debris had likely originated to the north of the official search area. This conclusion was based on the time the debris had taken to travel to the western Indian Ocean.

But in spite of the ATSB review, authorities called off the search last Jan 17, after almost three years and A$180 million (about RM600 million). They said the search would not be resumed as no specific location had been identified.

March 8, 2014, began like any other day. But the questions that we started asking then still haunt us today.