MH370 Anniversary: Debris, Timeline And Everything Else We Know About The Missing Plane 2 Years Later

Two years have passed since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and its 239 passengers mysteriously vanished over the Indian Ocean. But time has not produced many answers for families, friends, pilots, Internet conspiracy theorists and interested followers about what truly happened.

After a year in which authorities discovered the first piece of confirmed debris from the missing plane and the search began to wind down, here's a recap of everything we know about MH370.

The basics: MH370 was a Boeing 777 flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. It took off as normal at 00:41 local time and communicated as normal with air traffic control through about 01:07. The final transmission from MH370 was a man's voice, probably the pilot's, saying, "Goodnight Malaysian three seven zero." The plane is thought to have crashed into the Indian Ocean, according to BBC News.

The passengers: There were 239 people on board the plane when it disappeared: 227 passengers and 12 crew members. They included 152 Chinese people, 50 Malaysians, seven Indonesians, six Australians, five Indians, four French people and three Americans. Two people were from Ukraine, two from Iran, two from New Zealand, two from Canada and one from the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Russia and Taiwan, according to the manifest.

Two of the passengers, Pouria Nourmohammadi and Seyed Mohammed Reza Delavar, were later found to be asylum-seekers using stolen passports.

MH370's pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was an experienced pilot with more than 18,000 hours of flying under his belt. His co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, had about 3,000 hours of training, according to the New York Post. They, and everyone else on board the plane, are presumed dead.

The debris: For more than a year, there was absolutely no evidence that MH370 went down, causing theories of alien abduction and hijacking to proliferate online. But this past August, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that a wing part found by villagers on Réunion Island belonged to the plane.

"It is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts has conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris … is indeed MH370," Razak said at the time. French investigators tested the flaperon and verified in September that it came from the plane, NBC News reported.

As of Monday, authorities in Malaysia were analyzing two new pieces of debris from Mozambique and Réunion Island, according to Reuters.

The search: Australian authorities have been leading a $180 million sweep of the Indian Ocean since 2014, according to a government website. Last April, the major countries involved — Malaysia, Australia and China — decided to expand the search area to 120,000 square kilometers. The underwater search, being carried out by three vessels, is set to finish this summer.

"In the absence of credible new information that leads to the identification of a specific location of the aircraft, Malaysia, the People's Republic of China and Australia have agreed that there will be no further expansion of the search area," the website reads.

But Martin Dolan, the chief of the Australian agency in charge of the scan, recently said it's "very likely" the plane will be found in the remaining few months.

The families: Relatives of the missing have pushed for the search to continue until the plane is located, refusing to accept the government's assertion that their loved ones have perished.

“I don’t believe the plane crashed,” Gao Xianying, whose daughter was on MH370, told the Guardian recently. "Over the past two years, they have found no evidence to prove the plane crashed or that the passengers were all dead despite so many rounds of searching. If they cannot provide the evidence, I cannot believe them.”