Key numbers in hunt for Flight 370

Some numbers associated with the tragic mystery of Flight 370:

40 – Number of minutes Flight 370 had been flying before air traffic control lost contact with the plane on March 8 2014.

The plane was on a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing when it disappeared from radar and communications and went off course for reasons that remain unknown.

Investigators used automatic signals sent to a satellite to determine the plane had flown thousands of miles to the eastern Indian Ocean before crashing.

239 – Lives lost in the disaster, 227 passengers and 12 crew. Most of the victims, 152, were Chinese.

3 – Countries most involved in the search – Malaysia, China and Australia.

27 – Number of months spent on the search, which took longer than initially expected, mainly because of hostile winter weather.

46,000 – Size of search area in square miles.

1,100 – Distance in miles from the search area to the search ships’ port in Fremantle, Australia. Travelling between the two takes a week.

1.8 million – Area in square miles of the Indian Ocean’s surface that was searched by ship and plane.