Locator beacon battery had expired

The first comprehensive report into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 revealed on Sunday that the battery of the locator beacon for the plane's data recorder had expired more than a year before the jet vanished on March 8.

Apart from the anomaly of the expired battery, the detailed report devoted pages after pages describing the complete normality of the flight, which disappeared while heading from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The significance of the expired battery in the beacon of the plane's flight data recorder was not immediately apparent, except indicating that searchers would have had less of a chance of locating the aircraft in the Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed, even if they were in its vicinity.