Plane debris find on Réunion in Indian Ocean comes after search for missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was focused on 46,000 sq mile area

8 March 2014: A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 takes off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 12.41am local time, with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board. The plane is last seen on military radar at 2.14am, heading west over the Strait of Malacca. Half an hour later, the airline announces it has lost contact with the plane, which was due to land at approximately 6.30am.

9 March: Search efforts focus on the Gulf of Thailand. It is speculated that terrorism might be involved after it is discovered that two passengers on the flight were travelling with stolen passports. Authorities later clear all passengers of any link to terrorism.

11 March: The search team concentrates its efforts near Vietnam, the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand after a Vietnamese aircraft reports seeing a plane door off the south-west coast of Vietnam. But a search in the Andaman Sea finds nothing, and evidence begins to mount that the flight had headed west after it lost contact with air traffic controllers.

15 March: Satellite transmissions trace the plane to the Indian Ocean. Authorities search the homes of the pilots, Zaharie Ahmad Shah and Fariq Abdul Hamid, while Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, declares that evidence shows the plane was intentionally diverted and continued flying for more than six hours after disappearing from the radar.

18 March: New information suggests the change in the flight’s route was programmed into the cockpit computer, raising more questions about the pilots’ involvement. Investigators try to recover files from a flight simulator discovered at Shah’s home, which were deleted less than a month before the flight went missing.

24 March: Family members of passengers on board the flight march on the Malaysian embassy in Beijing demanding answers, after authorities say they have concluded the missing plane crashed in the Indian Ocean with the loss of all 239 people on board. Many of the families learn the news via a text message informing them: “We have to assume beyond all reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and none of those on board survived.”

7 April: The search team leader, Angus Houston, says it has found the “most promising lead” as a signal consistent with transmissions from the black box flight recorder and cockpit voice recorder of the missing plane is picked up for more than two hours in the Indian Ocean.

24 April: The search-and-rescue operation becomes search and recovery. A few days later the search moves to an underwater phase, using an autonomous underwater vehicle and a bathymetry survey to establish how deep the ocean is in an area about 430 miles long and 50 miles wide.

MH370: aircraft debris in Réunion almost certainly from a Boeing 777 Read more

26 June: Australian authorities issue a preliminary report in which they theorise that the plane flew on autopilot after the crew became incapacitated, possibly due to oxygen starvation.

17 July: Malaysia Airlines makes headlines again after another plane, flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, is shot down over rebel-controlled eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew on board.

28 August: Australia’s deputy prime minister, Warren Truss, says Flight MH370 “might have turned south a little earlier than we have previously expected”, as it is announced that airline staff tried to contact the flight crew by satellite phone after the plane disappeared from radar.

19 September: After a four-month lull, it is announced that the underwater search, involving depths of up to 3.7 miles (6km), will resume at the end of September.

4 October: It is revealed that the new underwater search involves ships dragging sonar devices called towfish through the water at about 100 metres above the seabed to hunt for wreckage. The towfish are equipped with jet fuel sensors and can transmit data to those on board the vessels.

January 2015: Senior Boeing 777 captain Simon Hardy suggests the missing aircraft’s final resting place is in the Indian Ocean, just outside the far south-western edge of the core search area.

28 January: Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation officially declares the case an accident, having concluded the aircraft exhausted its fuel “over a defined area of the southern Indian Ocean”, but adds that efforts to find the plane will continue.

7 March: Malaysia’s transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, says data will be re-examined and a new plan formulated if the plane is not found by the end of May, the same date the Australian government says the search of the priority zone is likely to be completed by late May.

23 July: Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, says the plane “will be found within the next year”. Two vessels continue search operations in the southern Indian Ocean, with more than 21,000 of the 46,332 sq miles of search area already covered.

29 July: A large piece of plane debris washes on to the shore of Réunion. The Malaysian prime minister later says the debris is very likely wreckage from a Boeing 777, and that it is being sent to France to establish whether it is from flight MH370.