Renewed calls for search mark MH370's 5-year anniversary

March 8 (UPI) -- Two hundred and thirty nine people disappeared aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 five years ago Friday in an aviation mystery that's still yet to turn up very many answers.

Amid this year's anniversary, officials and relatives are making renewed efforts to find the missing plane.

Investigators after a thorough review concluded last year the Boeing 777 went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean off Australia, a conclusion that doesn't satisfy everyone.

"Our prayers have remained unchanged: Find the plane. Find the passengers. Give us answers to what, why, how and if it comes to it, who," K.S. Narendran, whose wife Chandrika Sharma was on the flight, told the Express.

Though it was light on hard answers, last year's report from the Malaysian government did assert that it's nearly a certainty a mechanical problem is not to blame.

"Give us the truth. Not too many people we know are convinced that 459 pages of the 2018 report is the sum total of all that is known regarding the disappearance of MH370," he said. "Those who know more but have chosen silence, if indeed there are some, will eventually die a thousand deaths each day, for guilt is a latecomer but unforgiving squatter."

MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it dropped from radar and, presumably, crashed into the ocean. After search efforts that lasted for years, the plane's precise location has not been found.

A few pieces of the plane's wreckage, though, have turned up on the eastern shorelines of Africa.

The Malaysian government said this week it's willing to conduct another search if it can find considerable leads or proposals.

The governments of Australia, Malaysia and China, along with private companies, have already spent $160 million on searches for MH370 covering 46,000 square miles.

Part of the mystery is what caused the flight to disappear. Theories range from mechanical to the sinister, including one that says the airliner was hijacked by either a pilot or passenger. Last year's report ruled out pilot suicide as a cause and no evidence had turned up to support claims the flight was intentionally driven from the sky.