Ten years ago today, MH370 disappeared into thin air. The victims ...

It's a bizarre scene: a jagged, rusted piece of something that, even to the untrained eye, certainly looks like it was once part of an aeroplane, balanced on a white tablecloth in the middle of a busy shopping centre.

Nearby signs provide the necessary context: under examination, they read, these pieces of debris were found to be "almost certainly" part of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 — the Boeing 777-200 jetliner that ten years ago today disappeared with 239 people on board.

The plane or the remains of the passengers and crew have never been found. Nor is there a definitive explanation for why the aircraft dropped off the radar just 38 minutes after taking off. A collection of debris — some of which was on display to mark the 10th anniversary of the disappearance — is so far the only physical evidence of what happened on March 8, 2014.

"A decade later, I stand here still asking the same questions," a woman called Grace whose mother was onboard MH370 told the event in Subang Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, this week. "We still don't know what happened to the plane, where it is, how it happened, and why it happened."

If the image of aeroplane wreckage in a shopping mall in Malaysia is jarring, it's no more so than the question at the heart of the now decade-long MH370 mystery: a hulking aircraft full of passengers can't simply just vanish into thin air, can it?

Poets and dancers performed and family members of the passengers and crew lit candles at the remembrance event in Subang Jaya, Malaysia.(Reuters: Hasnoor Hussain)

From a computer anywhere in the world, you can pull up a website and watch thousands of planes crisscross the globe in real time. This is made possible by a complicated web of satellites, antennas and radar systems designed for the precise purpose of pinpointing exactly where an aircraft is at any one moment.

It's why commercial aeroplanes — and more precisely 64-metre-long jetliners — rarely disappear for long, let alone for ten years in the face of one of the largest and most expensive search efforts in history. And yet, this one did. 

"We, the next of kin of passengers and crew on MH370, strongly believe that the search for this plane extends far beyond our long-suffering, our need for closure, it extends to the greater question of aviation safety," Grace said, as shoppers milled around the stage.

"Each time every one of you or your loved ones take to the skies, you should have some confidence that your plane or the plane your loved ones are on will not vanish into thin air."

"Good night, Malaysian three seven zero."

At about 1:19am on March 8, 2014, one of two pilots steering MH370 — captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, or first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27 — sent the above dispatch to air traffic controllers on the ground as they prepared to cross into Vietnamese air space.

It was still early in what was supposed to be an almost six-hour journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. On board were 12 crew members and 227 passengers, made up primarily of Chinese and Malaysian nationals, but also six Australians, four French, five Indians, seven Indonesians, three Americans, two each from Canada, New Zealand, Iran and Ukraine, and single passengers from Taiwan, Russia, and the Netherlands.

Moments after the radio message, the aircraft disappeared from the air traffic control radar. It was the last time anyone on the flight was heard from.

Later the same morning, about an hour after the flight was scheduled to land in Beijing, Malaysian Airlines issued its first statement on the matter, confirming that air traffic control had lost contact with the aircraft and that the airline was working with a search and rescue team.

The search initially focused on the South China Sea between Vietnam and Malaysia, chosen largely because it was where the cockpit last had contact with the ground and because it was where the aircraft's transponders disconnected. 

By the end of the first week, however, the investigation had become far more complex. A military radar that picked up the plane after it was lost to air traffic control showed it doing a sharp turn and heading back the way it had just come, towards the Indian Ocean. 

Then analysis of satellite communication data from British telecommunications company Inmarsat led investigators to suspect that that MH370 had continued flying for about six hours after it dropped off the air traffic control radar.

That development presented two possibilities: either the plane flew north towards Kazakhstan or south into the Indian Ocean, exhausting its fuel somewhere in the vicinity of what investigators call the 7th arc. 

It was clear that the plane had dramatically deviated from its planned route, but what remains unclear is why.

Ten days after the disappearance, Australia took charge of a new multi-national search effort, this time focusing on an area of the Indian Ocean about 3,000 kilometres south-west of Perth.  

By now, a feverish media circus was in full swing. "The whole of the world's media ended up in Perth ... they were looking for stories, and they found me," said Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, an oceanographer from the University of Western Australia. 

Professor Pattiaratchi and his team quickly set about modelling where debris from the crash was most likely to wash up based on ocean currents and the plane going down around the 7th arc. Their prediction: the Western Indian Ocean.

The first suspected piece of the wreckage was found on Reunion Island in the Western Indian Ocean in 2015, more than 16 months after the disappearance. Further pieces believed to belong to MH370 were later found in Mozambique, South Africa, Mauritius, Zanzibar, Madagascar, and Tanzania.

The biggest challenge for locating the plane, Professor Pattiaratchi said, is the sheer depth of the ocean. "Imagine that you want to find a plane in the wilderness of Tasmania, but you're in a helicopter four kilometres up in the air trying to look for this plane, and then you have to do it with your eyes closed," he said. "We know where it is, but unfortunately the oceanography doesn't allow us to pinpoint a precise location."

The Australian-led search was among the largest of its kind in aviation history. The 52-day surface search covered several million square kilometres and a subsequent underwater sonar search, under the responsibility of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), covered more than 120,000 square kilometres — in other words, an area almost twice the size of Tasmania.

But after more than 1,000 days, in early 2017, the search was called off with little in the way of answers. They had identified four shipwrecks, but no plane.

A second chance came the following year when Texas-based private company Ocean Infinity launched their own three-month search in agreement with the Malaysian government, but they too were unable to locate the plane. 

"The reasons for the loss of MH370 cannot be established with certainty until the aircraft is found," the ATSB's final report, released publicly in October 2017, read. 

"It is almost inconceivable and certainly societally unacceptable in the modern aviation era with 10 million passengers boarding commercial aircraft every day, for a large commercial aircraft to be missing and for the world not to know with certainty what became of the aircraft and those on board."

The yawning gap between what we know for sure and what we don't has been rich terrain for conspiracy theories to germinate. Some believe the plane was hijacked, and in iterations of the theory, hidden on a remote island; others speculate that it was shot down, either intentionally or unintentionally.

One of the most publicised theories centres around a suicide plot by the captain. (Reports that the pilot had planned a route similar to what ended up being MH370's final journey on his at-home flight simulator is one of the key pieces of evidence put forward for this.)

From the early days of the investigation, passionate independent researchers from a range of disciplines have also gathered online to share information and their hypotheses for what might have happened, some of which formed part of the ATSB investigation leading the bureau to thank them in their report.

It's been 10 years since Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared into thin air. There have been no proven answers as to where it ended up. (AP: Joshua Paul)

But the only way to know what really happened is to find the wreckage and the family members and friends of those on board are adamant that the search must go on.

On that, this week, they received a glimmer of hope.

At the same remembrance service, the Malaysian Minister for Transport, Anthony Loke, said Texas-based Ocean Infinity had proposed another search on a "no find, no fee" basis and that he would "meet them anytime that they are ready to come to Malaysia".

A second private company — the US-based Deep Sea Vision — is also expected to send its proposal for a search operation to the Malaysian government by the middle of this year. 

In a statement, the chief executive of Ocean Infinity, Oliver Plunkett, confirmed that they had submitted a proposal to the Malaysian government. "This search is arguably the most challenging, and indeed pertinent one out there," he said. "We hope to get back on the search soon."

But the power is ultimately out of their hands, with the Malaysian government only willing to support a fresh search if there's compelling new evidence. "I will do everything possible to get the cabinet's approval to sign a new contract with Ocean Infinity for the search to resume as soon as possible," Loke said. "The government is steadfast in our resolve to locate MH370."

Jacquita Gonzales was among those who gathered at the shopping centre in Malaysia this week. Her husband, Patrick Gomes, was the lead steward on MH370. 

"I don't know if I can wait another 10 years," she told 60 Minutes last month. "10 years, of course, he is not coming back, so we have to accept it. But we still need to know exactly where he is and how it happened."