Katherine Tee said thought she ‘was going insane’ when she saw black smoke and fire over the Indian Ocean in 2014
One woman believes she has the key to solving the largest aviation mystery in modern times.
Katherine Tee, a British sailor claims she saw part of the missing Malaysian airlines craft on fire when it crashed 12 years ago.
On March 8 2014, 227 passengers and 12 crew members vanished after they boarded the Boeing 777-200ER in Kuala Lumpur flying to Beijing, China. It was just 40 minutes into the flight the plane disappeared from radar tracking, never to be seen again.
Tee believes that the “bright orange” and the “trail of black smoke” she spotted over the Indian Ocean was the Boeing craft on fire.
The search for the plane was re-launched at the end of last year, but multiple attempts to recover the craft have failed despite cutting edge technology.
Some debris was found along the coast of Africa and on islands in the Indian Ocean – but that has been all that has been recovered of MH370. Experts believe the aircraft may have deviated from its planned route, flying west for several hours before it disappeared.
Tee was sailing from Cochin, India, to Phuket, Thailand, with her husband Marc Horn when she claims to have seen MH370.
Tee told the Phuket Gazette she didn’t immediately report it because she thought she “was going insane.”
She explained: “I thought I saw a burning plane cross behind our stern from port to starboard, which would have been approximately north to south.
“Since that’s not something you see every day, I questioned my mind. I was looking at what appeared to be an elongated plane glowing bright orange, with a trail of black smoke behind it.
“It did occur to me that it might be a meteorite. But I thought it was more likely that I was going insane.
“It caught my attention because I had never seen a plane with orange lights before so I wondered what they were. I could see the outline of the plane, it looked longer than planes usually do.”
She said she saw another plane in the sky at the same time and assumed the pilot would report it.
She continued: “I wondered again why it had such bright orange lights. They reminded me of sodium lights. I thought it could be some anomaly or just a meteor.”
The couple continued to sail to Phuket for two days before they landed when they heard “everyone talking about the missing plane.” Tee “doubted” what she had seen. She added: “Besides, I thought they’d find it.”
Then the Liverpudlian went back through the GPS logs of her journey. She said: “Lo and behold, what we saw was consistent with the confirmed contact which the authorities had from MH370.
“This is what convinced me to file a report with the full track data for our voyage to the relevant authorities.”
Tee reported her sighting to the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) in June 2014.
