Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which was carrying 239 people aboard, disappeared without a trace an hour after it departed from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 last year.
To date, no wreckage of the Boeing 777 has yet been found and investigators said that they will no longer expand the search zone for the missing plane.
The incident is now considered as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in aviation and has led to a number of theories on what really happened, including outlandish ideas that the aircraft was abducted by extraterrestrial beings.
A mathematician and his team, however, have an idea what happened to the doomed Beijing-bound aircraft.
Applied mathematician Goong Chen, from Texas A&M University at Qatar, and colleagues have come up with a mathematical model that could provide an explanation as to why no plane debris have yet been found.
Taking into consideration the last known whereabouts of the aircraft, the group conducted a numerical simulation on a supercomputer of the Boeing 777 plunging into the ocean, which in applied mathematics and aerospace engineering is known as a "water entry" problem.
Chen and his team simulated five different situations and found that the lack of oil spills and floating debris near the supposed location of the crash suggests that the plane dove into the water at a vertical angle.
If the plane entered the water at this angle, no large bending moment would take place, which is what occurs when external forces are applied to the plane and break up the fuselage.
A vertical water-entry would be the smoothest entry and is characterized by small bending moments when compared with other angles of entry, so the airplane would be less likely to have broken up on entry near the surface of the ocean. It also could explain the absence of debris and oil in the area.
Chen likewise agrees with the suggestion of aviation experts regarding the wings of the plane. If these had broken off immediately, they would have sunk down to the bottom of the ocean along with other heavy debris so little or no trace can be spotted.
Chen, however, acknowledged, that the final moments of the plane can only be revealed when its black box is recovered and decoded someday.
All 239 people aboard the plane - 227 passengers and 12 crew - are presumed dead. The government made an announcement in January that declared the airplane missing in an accident.
Photo: Dave Heuts | Flickr
