After several delays, the plane's black boxes have now arrived in the UK after the rebels handed them to investigators.
And what happens next here is experts will analyze the information contained on those devices, but information learned from that could take weeks.
CNN's Rachel Crane takes a look at why black boxes are so crucia to an investigation after a plane goes down.
Following a plane crash, the search for survivors always comes first.
But just as important is the search for answers -- the why and the how.
Often, those answers are found in the black box.
Since the '60s, all commercial airplanes have been required to have one on board.
Now, the name is a little misleading, because they're actually orange.
And when we're talking about a black box, we're talking about two different boxes --
one being the cockpit voice recorder, the other being the flight data recorder.
Together they weigh anywhere between 20 to 30 pounds and they have to be crash-proof.
Black boxes can survive just about anything --
temperatures up to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour, forces that are 3,400 g's; now, it's 3,400 times the force of gravity.
They're waterproof and they can save recorded data for two years. And it's a lot of data.
The cockpit voice recorder records the crew's conversation and background noise.
By listening to the ambient sounds in the cockpit before a crash, experts can determine if a stall took place, the RPMs of the engine and the speed at which the plane was traveling.
When these sounds are cross-referenced with ground control conversations, they can even help searchers locate a crash site.
Then there's the flight data recorder.
It gathers 25 hours of technical data from airplane sensors, recording several thousand discrete pieces of information --
data about the air speed, altitude, pitch, acceleration, roll, fuel, and the list goes on and on.
But to make sense of the data, first you have to find it -- not an easy thing to do when a plane crashes into the ocean.
Both black box components are outfitted with underwater locater beacons, which self-activate the moment they come into contact with water.
They send pings once per second to signal their location
and can transmit data from as deep as 20,000 feet for up to 30 days, when their batteries then run out.
But on land, there's no such pinging to help guide the search.
Investigators have to sift through the wreckage until they find it.