Timeline of the three-year search for doomed Beijing-bound plane

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A relative of a passenger onboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 cries as she talks on her mobile phone at Beijing Capital International Airport March 8, 2014. File photo: Reuters

Published: 2:58pm, 17 Jan 2017Updated: 2:58pm, 17 Jan 2017

The end of the deep-sea sonar search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 leaves the largest and most technologically challenging search in aviation history unresolved. Some of the key moments in the search:

March 8, 2014: Air traffic control loses contact with the plane 40 minutes into a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. An air and sea search begins four hours later in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott hold a bilateral meeting on the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in Perth in 2014. File photo: AFP

March 15, 2014: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announces that Flight 370 was tracked by military radar doubling back across the Strait of Malacca and was sending satellite signals seven and a half hours after take-off. The aircraft then flew either northwest toward central Asia as far as Kazakhstan or southwest over the southern Indian Ocean. Signal analysis quickly ruled out the northern flight path.

April 8, 2014: An Australian ship towing a US Navy listening device hears two signals consistent with Flight 370’s flight recorders west of Australia. Submerged a month, the recorders are near the end of their battery lives. “I’m now optimistic that we will find the aircraft, or what is left of the aircraft, in the not-too-distant future,” search coordinator Angus Houston says. When the initial sonar search yields nothing, it’s expanded to an area of 60,000 square kilometres.