Today marks the sixth month since Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing. No sign of the plane, not even a debris, bodies or their belongings.
Grieving families are still hoping for their loved ones be found - dead or alive. The agony is very much alive.
Analysts are still studying around 1,000 possible flight paths that the flight might have taken to reach its final resting place, according to the Australian head of the search operation.
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Why the plane might have changed course and who was responsible remains a mystery, although authorities have said they believe it was a "deliberate act" rather than the result of a technical malfunction.
There were 227 passengers and 12 Malaysian crew travelling on Flight 370 when it disappeared.
The vast majority of passengers - 153 - were Chinese but there were also citizens of Canada, Indonesia, Ukraine, France, the Netherlands and Australia.
Among them were artists, teachers, business people, students and many Chinese holidaymakers who had been overseas seeking an escape from their country's polluted skies.
Our officials have said they believe the plane was deliberately steered off course by "a person or persons"- leaving open the possibility that one or more of the passengers was involved in foul play. Within days of the plane's disappearance suspicion fell on two Iranian passengers who were found to have been travelling on stolen passports belonging to an Italian and an Austrian.
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However, investigators later ruled out their involvement in some kind of terror plot. The men appear to have been economic migrants attempting to reach Germany. Foreign intelligence agencies are believed to have found nothing suspicious in the backgrounds of any of the passengers.
Confusion over where Flight 370 might have crashed and Malaysia's initial failure to reveal that the plane had turned back across the Malay peninsula meant early search and rescue operations were spread across a vast area. This ranged from the Gulf of Thailand to the the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
However, 10 days after the plane disappeared it became clear that it had in fact flown south to the Indian Ocean. Australia took control of the search effort and the focus moved south.
In early April, British, Chinese and Australian search vessels in the Indian Ocean all reported detecting signals they believed could be from the underwater locator beacons attached to Flight 370's flight data recorders.
But those detections came to nothing and the limited battery life of the "black box" recorders means that they would have stopped emitting signals after a few weeks at best. An aerial search for debris was called off in late April and an underwater search was suspended in May.
Since then Australian and Chinese vessels have been building a complex map of the ocean floor through a so-called bathymetric study.
Those maps will guide search teams who are set to restart the hunt for Flight 370 in late September as part of a one-year, £29.5 million expedition. It is being conducted by Fugro, a Dutch engineering firm, and by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Australia's equivalent to the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
Three vessels will be deployed, including one hired by Malaysia. China, which had 153 passengers on the plane and is therefore the other major player in the mystery, has not so far volunteered either to take part in or to help fund the operation.
The relatives of those on board Flight MH370 have been offered $50,000 (£30,650) in "initial compensation". But only seven families have so far accepted the payment, according to the Malaysian government.
The rest of the families say they feel that accepting the money obliges them to accept Malaysia's verdict on the plane, that it has crashed at sea, with no firm evidence of that having been its fate.
For the same reason - an unwillingness to confront the worst without evidence - few of the relatives have hired lawyers to argue their compensation cases in court.
According to the Montreal convention, the airline must pay $176,000 for each of the passengers on board. But relatives can eventually sue for more compensation, with some lawyers estimating that an American court could award $8 million but that a Chinese court would be likely to award far less.
Grieving families are still hoping for their loved ones be found - dead or alive. The agony is very much alive.
Analysts are still studying around 1,000 possible flight paths that the flight might have taken to reach its final resting place, according to the Australian head of the search operation.
There were 227 passengers and 12 Malaysian crew travelling on Flight 370 when it disappeared.
The vast majority of passengers - 153 - were Chinese but there were also citizens of Canada, Indonesia, Ukraine, France, the Netherlands and Australia.
Among them were artists, teachers, business people, students and many Chinese holidaymakers who had been overseas seeking an escape from their country's polluted skies.
Our officials have said they believe the plane was deliberately steered off course by "a person or persons"- leaving open the possibility that one or more of the passengers was involved in foul play. Within days of the plane's disappearance suspicion fell on two Iranian passengers who were found to have been travelling on stolen passports belonging to an Italian and an Austrian.
However, investigators later ruled out their involvement in some kind of terror plot. The men appear to have been economic migrants attempting to reach Germany. Foreign intelligence agencies are believed to have found nothing suspicious in the backgrounds of any of the passengers.
Confusion over where Flight 370 might have crashed and Malaysia's initial failure to reveal that the plane had turned back across the Malay peninsula meant early search and rescue operations were spread across a vast area. This ranged from the Gulf of Thailand to the the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
However, 10 days after the plane disappeared it became clear that it had in fact flown south to the Indian Ocean. Australia took control of the search effort and the focus moved south.
In early April, British, Chinese and Australian search vessels in the Indian Ocean all reported detecting signals they believed could be from the underwater locator beacons attached to Flight 370's flight data recorders.
But those detections came to nothing and the limited battery life of the "black box" recorders means that they would have stopped emitting signals after a few weeks at best. An aerial search for debris was called off in late April and an underwater search was suspended in May.
Since then Australian and Chinese vessels have been building a complex map of the ocean floor through a so-called bathymetric study.
Those maps will guide search teams who are set to restart the hunt for Flight 370 in late September as part of a one-year, £29.5 million expedition. It is being conducted by Fugro, a Dutch engineering firm, and by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Australia's equivalent to the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
Three vessels will be deployed, including one hired by Malaysia. China, which had 153 passengers on the plane and is therefore the other major player in the mystery, has not so far volunteered either to take part in or to help fund the operation.
The relatives of those on board Flight MH370 have been offered $50,000 (£30,650) in "initial compensation". But only seven families have so far accepted the payment, according to the Malaysian government.
The rest of the families say they feel that accepting the money obliges them to accept Malaysia's verdict on the plane, that it has crashed at sea, with no firm evidence of that having been its fate.
For the same reason - an unwillingness to confront the worst without evidence - few of the relatives have hired lawyers to argue their compensation cases in court.
According to the Montreal convention, the airline must pay $176,000 for each of the passengers on board. But relatives can eventually sue for more compensation, with some lawyers estimating that an American court could award $8 million but that a Chinese court would be likely to award far less.