It was way past midnight, but cameras were still rolling and reporters filing updates on the jetliner's bizarre disappearance from sections they had made their own.
After filing my own reports all I did for the next couple of hours was watch CNN - I couldn't bring myself to turn the TV off.
The next morning, relatives and friends of missing passengers streamed into the arrival hall, crying, some sobbing, others wailing.
The MH370 missing also included friends and relatives of other New Zealanders.
On Facebook, I received a message from Zaidah Mustaffa, a teaching fellow at the University of Auckland, telling me her relative Suhaili Mustaffa was one of the passengers.
"I have been preparing myself to expect the worst," she told me.
At media conferences, Malaysian authorities made contradictory and odd statements.
Air force chief Tan Sri Rodzali Daud reportedly said the aircraft had made a detour and was detected at 2.40am near Palau Perak, off the Malacca Straits.
A few hours later, he denied that he had said such a thing and released a statement the next day that the last radar signal was received at 2.15am from a different location. The time of the signal was amended to 2.30am the following day.
Cover-up suspicions and conspiracy theories begin to stack up: that the Boeing plane was hijacked by terrorists, seized by Chinese or American operatives and destroyed in a corporate insurance scam.
It seemed everyone and their dog wanted to solve this aviation mystery.
A Malaysian shaman, or bomoh, conducted rituals with coconuts and bamboo binoculars at the airport, claiming it would help locate the missing aircraft.
Auxiliary police were used to keep confused and hysterical family members and the media forcefully apart. I became a security target after some officers learned that I spoke both Mandarin and Malay.
It wasn't long before I was threatened with arrest for doing an interview with a Chinese relative at Cyberjaya Resort by shouting my questions from outside a police cordon.
At Everly Hotel in Putrajaya, a father of one of the missing passengers went on his knees asking if I had any information about his son.
Like a common criminal, the man was whisked away after hotel security learned I was a reporter.
Away from the daily media conference, some Malaysian officials were happy to discuss the investigations with reporters.
One senior investigator loved talking about food, and over a conversation about nasi lemak, assam pedas and roti canai, I sneaked in questions about the investigations.
He said the pilots were now the main focus after it was determined that there had been no commotion in the cockpit at the last transmission.
The next day, the Herald broke the news that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and his co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid were key suspects.
I kept in touch with the contacts I had made during the three-week assignment and was introduced to a pilot friend of Captain Zaharie in Auckland. The friend told how he thought the plane went down, the most plausible explanation at the time.
The captain was facing family and relationship problems and was not in the right state of mind to fly, he said.
The friend's guess was that Zaharie could have taken the aircraft on a last joyride.
Three months after that interview, Malaysian police told the Sunday Times in London that its investigation into the people on the flight had cleared everyone except the pilot.
A year on, scenes of the screaming Chinese mother being dragged out of the media conference room, the crying, kneeling Malaysian father and the sobbing relatives writing to their loved ones via a message board at the airport remain fresh in my mind.
Where is the plane now? Did the pilot have something to do with its disappearance? Was the jetliner hijacked or did it crash land? We are no closer to getting an answer and unless by some miracle the plane is found, I don't think we ever will.
