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One woman claims she holds the answer to cracking aviation's greatest modern mystery. Katherine Tee, a British sailor, insists she witnessed part of the vanished Malaysian Airlines aircraft ablaze as it plummeted 12 years ago.
On March 8 2014, 227 passengers and 12 crew members disappeared after boarding the Boeing 777-200ER in Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, China. Just 40 minutes into the journey, the aircraft vanished from radar systems, never to be spotted again.
Tee is convinced that the "bright orange" glow and "trail of black smoke" she observed above the Indian Ocean was the Boeing plane engulfed in flames. The hunt for the aircraft was relaunched at the end of last year, though numerous recovery efforts have proved unsuccessful despite state-of-the-art equipment, reports the Mirror.
Some wreckage has washed up along Africa's coastline and on Indian Ocean islands - but that represents all that's been retrieved of MH370.
Aviation specialists suspect the plane may have strayed from its intended path, heading west for several hours before vanishing.
Tee was navigating from Cochin, India, to Phuket, Thailand, alongside her husband Marc Horn when she claims to have witnessed MH370.
Speaking to the Phuket Gazette, Tee revealed she didn't report it straight away because she feared she "was going insane."
She said: "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 noted another aircraft in the sky simultaneously and assumed its pilot would report the unusual sight.
She added: "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 pair continued their journey to Phuket for two more days before landing, only to hear "everyone talking about the missing plane."
Tee "doubted" her own observations, thinking: "Besides, I thought they'd find it."
The Liverpudlian then revisited the GPS logs from her voyage. She revealed: "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.
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