>> i am don lemon and thank you for joining us. of course, we will continue with the live coverage of cnn in just about 30 minutes and if something happens, we will break into the programming to bring you the latest. stick the around for a special report, "flight 370, the final hours" begins right now. the following is a cnn special report. a high-tech aircraft, an experienced crew, and 227 passengers. what began as a routine flight from malaysia airlines 370 became the total opposite. leaving behind an ending grief and unanswered questions. flight 370, the final hours.

here in the cockpit of this malaysian airlines plane, the c captain trains this co-pilot to fly the aircraft. >> set, please. >> set at 3,000. >> reporter: calculations and notes and a towering storm to avoid. >> we can see it on the radar and penetrating, but yellow and red. >> reporter: adjustments made. the trainee touches down moments later. a perfect landing. it's february 2014, and the trainee is fariq hamid. this time he would be in the right-hand seat this time as the first officer of malaysia airlines flight 370. march 7th, 2014, kuala lumpur, malaysia, in one of the busiest

cities in southeast asia, millions of people are on the move, including philip wood, a 51-year-old ibm executive. thousands of miles a wway in beijing, the day begins as usual for his partner sarah baejack. >> i get up early and drink coffee watching the sunrise and we live next to a apple orchard and i do my yoga every morning and eat oatmeal and go the work. >> reporter: and in a few hours, philip will take the flight home to sarah. kuala lumpur connects southeast asia to the continent. paul weeks needs to make it thousands of miles inland to mongolia. >> and he was doing it for right reason. it was his dream job. >> reporter:er and he is an engineer and husband to danika and father to two boys.

>> he spent so much time with the kids, and took them to the zoo. and they were like his little shadow. >> reporter: in fact, preparing the boys was a major issue preparing for paul's 28-day abroad assignment. >> itt wthis was a big change fe family and especially lincoln, and he had bought him a little mini pad to skype him and a map to know where daddy would be. >> reporter: when he left home, he told his wife that he was leaving a few things behind. >> he said, i am leaving behind my wedding ring and watch, and if anything should happen to me, i want the wedding ring to go to the first son marry and the second to have the watch. i said something like, don't be stupid, you come back and i will give it back to you, and you can give it to them then. >> reporter: hours earlier, first officer hamid and captain

passed through the airport. >> they are there early, and they are going to talk to the dispatcher. >> reporter: miles o'brien is an aviation expert for cnn. >> they will talk about the routes, and the winds aloft and with the turbulence and with all of that in mind, they will come to an agreement of how much fuel to board on the plane. >> reporter: they get enough fuel to get to beijing and 45 minutes to spare. and hours later, philip wood, and paul weeks and 225 other passengers arrive for the flight. bags checked, boarding passes printed. among them, a group of chinese painters and caligrifers. and also passengers flying for business and pleasure as well as the flight crew and two men with

illegal passports. in the cockpit the captain and first officer make the final preparations. >> oxygen, check. instruments, check. >> reporter: in the sim yu ulat pilot mitchell casado shows martin savidge the route. and programming the simulator how to fly to the destination. >> so it will take this plane essentially from kuala lumpur to beijing. >> reporter: and the plane is ready, and before taking off, paul weeks sends a message home. >> the last line says that this counts as one day, so it means that it is only 27 days until i see you all again. >> reporter: around 12:30 a.m., malaysian airlines 370 flight pushes back from the gate and eases toward the runway and the aircraft is cleared for takeoff. >> all right. so the brakes are off, and everything is set.

>> reporter: the captain booss s the massive engines. the plane roars into the sky. its altimeter tracking the time through 5,000 feet and then 10,000 feet, and then airborne, the air traffic controllers pick up the flight. >> they will see you on the radar, because you have a squawk code in the transponder which is going to turn the simple radar return into something that has a lot of information on it. it includes the flight number and the speend the altitude. >> coming up to 17,000 feet. >> this is malaysia here, and this is vietnam here. this is cambodia on the left side. >> reporter: as the plane reaches the cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, the pilots can relax a little, and so can the passengers like paul weeks and philip wood. it is 1:19 in the morning, and a voice from the cockpit addresses air traffic control saying

simply "all right. good night." for flight 370, it has been a routine evening. coming up -- an aircraft with 239 people aboard vanishes. complete i. . >> it has to be a practical joke, and then it stayed mi missing, and it stayed missing. when folks in the lower 48 think about what they get from alaska,

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march 8th, just before 1:00 a.m., malaysian airlines flight 370, and its 239 passengers and crew are 35,000 feet above the gu gulf of thailand. cruising comfortably in a boeing 777. >> the 777 was a pivotal aircraft for boeing, and it has a sterling safety record. >> it is extremely safe. it is triple redundant and there

are at least three backups for every system, electrical, hydraulic. >> reporter: in the cockpit of flight 370, the captain with over 18,000 hours in the air, and a stellar reputation. >> he is the kind of guy that i want to fly with, you know. the quintessential good airline pilot, and he is everything that you would want to have taking you down to the ground on that dark and stormy night. >> reporter: seated beside him, 27-year-old first officer fariq hamid who has just under 3,000 hours in the air. >> an airline pilot in the mid-20s with the amount of experience that he had would never be flying a 777 in the u.s. that would be unheard of. and so this guy was doing well. >> reporter: doing so well that fariq hamid had just finished tra training on the 777, and flight 370 is his first time flying the plane without a check co-pilot.

and nearly 30 minutes after take theoff, all seems well, according to the automatic message sent from the aircraft's communication system. >> that is kind of a like a text message that is just checking in, and everything about that indicates that a plane at cruise, and everything is fine, and everything is normal. >> reporter: 12 minutes later at 1:19 a.m., a hand off with air traffic control. >> what happens in the handoffs is that the controller in the station that is giving an airplane over to another sector gets on the phone to the next sector and says, hey, i have malaysian airlines 370 coming your way, and do you see him? then they acknowledge it, and i will give you a handoff and he will be checking in with you shortly. >> reporter: somebody in the cockpit signs off with "all right. good night." but just two minutes later, signs of trouble. >> so everything is kind of going quiet all of the sudden, in a hurry.

>> reporter: at 1:21 a.m., the plane's transponder goes silent. >> when you turn that off, it is like lights are out. and so there is no more voice communication. >> reporter: and no signal to the air traffic control with the plane's location, speed and altitude. >> it could have been physically turned off. it could have been a circuit breaker pulled or there could have been some catastrophic failure on the plane which caused an electrical disruption. >> reporter: and then the 777 makes an unexpected left turn heading way off west and off course. >> what we see is a quick turn and almost 180-degree turn back toward land. >> reporter: according to the source close to the investigation, military radar then shows the plane dropping and flying as low as 12,000 feet. >> the controller at the other

end is expecting a call from the aircraft. >> reporter: but the call never comes. >> there was repeated attempts to the reach the aircraft, and not only on the 120.9 frequency which is the frequency they were assigned, but also on an emergency frequency. >> reporter: there is no answer. >> they are going through the checklist for a missing aircraft, an aircraft that has apparently fallen off of the radar screen and is not commun communicating. what is going on? >> reporter: at 2:30 a.m. a worried air traffic controller is worried, because they have lost contact with the plane. flight 370 has disappeared. by 6:30 a.m., the sun is rising over beijing. the same time flight 370 is scheduled to land.

but there is no plane and no sign of philip wood, paul weeks and the 237 other passengers and crew members on board. coming up, the news no one could prepare for. >> after more than 30 hours without any contact with the aircraft, we believe that the family members should prepare themselves for the worst. [ male announcer ] this is karen and jeremiah.

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>> reporter: a large triple seven jet is missing, and the news makes its way around the world. >> a malaysian airlines has confirmed that it has lost contact with the plane -- >>[ speaking foreign language ]. >> families begin to ga tler th at information centers set up by the airline in kuala lumpur and beijing. >> by 12 hours, disbelief started to set in, like, this can't be happening. it is surreal. >> reporter: it soon becomes apparent that it is going to be difficult for the families to get clear information. and anxiety turns to anger. this woman is telling families

that she can't get them an answer until noon the next day. no, answer us now, this man yells. >> we are not getting any information and whether they know anything and they are not telling us, and at this stage, i'm just -- it is just blank. blank, waiting and praying. >> reporter: just north of perth, australia, danika weeks waits for news of her husband paul. >> and the good news is that they have not had to deal with this before, and the bad news is that malaysia has not had to deal with this situation before. and the unfortunate situation is that we are all having to watch them learn how the deal with this. >> reporter: with a lack of clear miscommunication, speculation and theories abound.

>> could it have been structural rapid dekcome propression or could it be some criminal attack? >> reporter: but what? terrorist organization or other thing? this theory is boosted that there are two passengers on board with fake passports. that talk of terrorism surprisingly gives sarah hope. >> if i were a ter the errroris would want to protect the valuable assets on the plane. >> reporter: so as the family presses for answers. >> ships have been deployed to the southeastern seas.

>> reporter: searchers are going to the seas, but they don't know where to go. first they concentrate on the malaysian peninsula, and then expand to the vietnam. and west towards the andaman islands, but there is another problem. >> the way that the international investigators have been working together is kind of like a bunch of teenaged girls running around the locker room all trying to show each other what they have got. >> reporter: and the uk is there and australia is there and the u.s. is there and who is in charge? it has to be managed better in order to get those answers. >> reporter: the answers begin to come fast and furious with the discovery of several satellite pings sent from the plane referred to as handshakes. >> so there is a box on the plane that gets you the satellite. that box was still alive. so it is not unlike the cell phone, and even if your cell phone is on, and even though you

are not making a call, it is checking in with the cell tower saying, i am hee, and you are there. >> reporter: and those pings give the satellite company enough information to reconstruct the plane's likely flight path. surprisingly, the data shows that the 777 flies for several more hours after disappearing from radar. and it ends in the south indian ocean. the constant changing, conflicting news puts families in a tailspin. >> it is a roller coaster ride, and one moment i'm fine and the next moment, i'm a complete mess. i wish i had some positivity that, that, you know, he was coming back. ♪ i will be right here waiting for you ♪ >> reporter: on march 24th that the positivity is dashed when malaysia airlines sends families

they have not been able to contact this text. malaysian airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that mh 370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived. a short time later, malaysia's prime minister makes an announcement. >> like an image of light, flight 370 disappeared into the ocean. >> what made them hurry to make that statement. if they thought it would make everybody happy and they would go home, it did not work, did it? >> reporter: and sarah is still trying to desperately cling to hope. >> i am coping through it. there's just a huge vacuum, because, you know, it is not

only that fiphilip is missing, d by any reasonable person's calculations, he is most likely permanently missing, and i can't quite accept that, because, you know what my head is telling me and what my heart are telling me are two very conflicting things. >> reporter: as she hopes, the data is fine-tuned, and the search area shifts again, and the world waits. >> we can't stop think thing about this. and wondering, because how could it be? in the 21st century that a modern airliner could go missing. how could that be? and here we are with a missing airliner, and i think that it just boggles people's minds, and we just need to know what happened, don't we? >> reporter: a mystery unsolved, clues scattered, questions

unanswered, and heartbroken family families are left to pick up the piec pieces. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com >> hello, everyone. you are in the "cnn newsroom," and i'm don lemon. everybody is hoping that sunday is different than previous days of searching. the number of rock solid clues remain zero. daybreak in australia means that the search planes are headed for the debris areas, but there is a problem, the weather. it is raining, and the clouds are low, and the weather shows no improvement. the chinese crew found something floating in the darkness and scooped up some objects, and we

are waiting to find out what those objects are. and so we will start with will ripley who is in perth, australia. and the sun is up, and the planes are on the mission, but it is a race against the weather, right? >> it sure is, don. 7:00 a.m. here at pearce air force base in australia, and we have moved the camera outside of the tent that we have been broadcasting overnight here, because i want to show you what the pilots are seeing here taking off this morning and what they are heading into. you can see the clouds that are rolling in, and this is dramatic. this is not here when the sun came up, and they are moving in quickly, and there is a big storm out to the west of the search area shown on the radar, and that the could hamper the planes in the air, and the ships. and we have had the search called off in portions of the indian ocean, because the weather gets too the dangerous for the pilots. when it is dropping to zero

visibility, you can't search if you can't see through the clouds. that is what the pilots and the ship crews are up against today. >> let's talk about what everybody is waiting to hear about, the objects retrieved from the ocean. do we know anything about them? >> we foe that two ships yesterday retrieved objects that they pulled from the ocean, a ship from china and australia, and those objects are sitting on the vessels right now waiting to be examined. and what is going to happen here is that planes are going to be spotted and marked yesterday and the crews know the coordinates and that is where they are going to be headed this afternoon, and planes are going to be searching for additional objects and we need to stress that we don't know if they are going to be connected in any way to flight 370, but there are a lot of objects frankly floating around in the indian ocean, but what is new here that has not happened before is that planes that have been searching for debris are now looking and