A Malaysia Airlines that took off with more than 200 people on board has been missing for nearly three days, and a massive search of the South China Sea has turned up nothing conclusive.

While lots of theories on what happened have been floated, we won’t have any good answers until officials get their hands on the plane’s “black boxes” — the flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR).

This disappearance brings back memories of Air France flight 447, which went missing over the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009. It was five days before any debris was found, and nearly two years before the FDR and CVR were found.