At first, the search effort for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 focused mainly on the South China Sea.<br /><br />But it switched to the Indian Ocean as radar and satellite tracking data fed suspicions that the Boeing 777 was deliberately flown hundreds or possibly thousands of miles off course.<br /><br />Investigators believe the aircraft’s communication systems were disabled on purpose. An early theory was that it had headed out over the Andaman Islands.<br /><br />An investigation began into the pilot and co-pilot. <br /><br />Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah had a flight simulator and was reportedly politically active. Co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid was said to have breached safety rules in the past by letting passengers into the cockpit.<br /><br />Their homes in Kuala Lumpur were searched and passengers’ backgrounds were also probed. At least two, both Iranians, had used stolen passports but this <br />was linked to illegal immigration rather than any terrorist motive.<br /><br />As more countries joined the search, satellite signals indicated the plane may have flown for six hours or more after dropping off Malaysian military radar.<br /><br />They also placed it within either a corridor <br />from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, or a southern corridor from Indonesia to the Indian Ocean off Australia.<br /><br />An increasing number of floating objects are being spotted in the search zone where the flight ‘ended’, in the southern Indian Ocean west of Perth, Australia.<br /><br />The next challenge is recovering debris and crucially, finding the black box flight recorders.<br /><br />Time is of the essence as the locator beacons they carry fade out after 30 days. <br /><br />Flight MH370 vanished less than an hour after take-off.<br /><br />Search teams know that if the black boxes remain at the bottom of the ocean, the mystery of what happened on March 8 may never be solved.
