MH370 six months on

Six months after Malayia Airlines flight 370 vanished without a trace en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the plane has yet to be found. The search for the wreckage of the plane is proceeding, albeit slowly, off the coast of western Australia, and experts say it could be over a year before the area where MH370 is believed to be located is searched completely.

A joyride to oblivion

MH370, carrying 239 people on board, vanished from radar traffic on March 8. The plane's disappearance sparked a media frenzy, baffled investigators and generated a host of conspiracy theories.

But experts say the best theory on what befell MH370, is that the pilot or pilots purposely crashed the plane.

"The best working theory is that the plane was taken by persons, and what I mean is that there is the possibility of looking at an intersection of pilot suicide of one or both of the pilots, who may well have taken the aircraft on a joyride to oblivion," independent aviation analyst Chris Yates of the UK-based Yates consulting told DW. "That's the bottom line, and that's based on the whole body of evidence that seems to point in that direction," he added.

The plane's transponder was switched off during the early hours of the morning of March 8, local time, which made the aircraft go dark as far as radar tracking. "In that time, from those devices being turned off, to a couple of hours later, the aircraft effectively did a u-turn in the sky, and did specific movements that could only have been done if the aircraft was under human control," Yates said.

On March 24, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that, based on the accumulated evidence, MH370 had crashed into the south Indian Ocean.

Painstaking search, little process

The search area for the missing plane is a 60,000-square-kilometer area of ocean floor far off the west coast of Australia. This stretch of ocean floor is currently being mapped into order to more optimally target search efforts. Thus far, no debris associated with MH370 has been discovered.

"The complexities surrounding the search cannot be overstated. It involves vast areas of the Indian Ocean with only limited known data and aircraft flight information," the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the investigation, said on its website. "While it is impossible to determine with certainty where the aircraft may have entered the water, all the available data and analysis indicate a highly probable search area close to a long but narrow arc of the southern Indian Ocean."

Yates believes it could take more than a year before this stretch of ocean is searched completely because the submersibles used to search the ocean depths operate at effectively walking speed and weather conditions are not always favorable.

Still, Australian officials are hopefully they will locate the plane, with Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss telling parliament he was confident the wreckage of the plane is located in the search area.

"I want to assure the families of those on MH370 that we have not forgotten the importance of maintaining the search for that aircraft; we are continuing that search uninterrupted," Truss told the Australian Associated Press in July.

Going forward, developments are also underway to significantly improve the monitoring of aircraft flying over the ocean. The highest priority, according to Yates, is to improve the life expectancy of the aircraft black boxes from 30 to 90 days.

Inmarsat, the UK satellite firm which was has offered assistance in tracking the missing flight, offered the use of its satellites free of charge in emergencies such as MH370. "This will be a significant benefit to the airline community going forward," Yates said.