As aircraft and ships continued to search for
debris which might be that of the missing flight MH370 on Friday a Malaysian
woman on a flight across the Indian Ocean claimed to have seen an aircraft in
the water near the Andaman Islands on the day the jet disappeared. The Kuala
Lumpur wife was so convinced about what she saw at 2.30pm on March 8, several
hours after MH370 vanished, that she filed an official report with police that
very day – a full five days before the search for the plane was expanded to the
area around the Andaman Islands.
News of her apparent sighting came as a blank
was drawn after two days of searching in the Indian Ocean for two objects
deemed by experts as possibly being from the missing plane. Her account will be
seen by many as having credibility as the islands lie within the northern
corridor officials speculated that the plane might have traveled along after
radar contact was lost.
However,
Mrs Dalelah said she had received scorn about her account, including from a
pilot who said the aircraft she was on would have been too high for her to have
seen anything on the ocean below. But mother of 10 Mrs Latife Dalelah, 53,
insisted she saw a silver object in the shape of an aircraft on the water as
she was flying from Jeddah to Kuala Lumpur. It was about an hour after her
aircraft had flown past the southern Indian city of Chennai. ‘Throughout the
journey I was staring out of the window of the aircraft as I couldn’t sleep
during the flight,’ she told the New Straits Times.
The in-flight monitor
showed that her plane was crossing the Indian Ocean and she had seen several
shipping liners and islands – before she saw the silvery object. ‘I took a
closer look and was shocked to see what looked like the tail and wing of an
aircraft on the water,’ she said. ‘I woke my friends on the flight but they
laughed me off,’ she added. The same reaction has come from a pilot who
questioned how anyone flying at about seven miles above sea level could see
anything like a boat or ship from so high up.
But Mrs Dalelah insisted to the
paper: ‘I know what I saw. I am convinced that I saw the aircraft. I will not
lie. I had just returned from my pilgrimage.’ A large part of what she thought
was an aircraft was submerged, she said. When she tried to tell an air
stewardess what she had seen, she was told to get some sleep. When her plane
landed at Kuala Lumpur at about 4pm on that Saturday she told her children what
she had seen.‘That is when they told me that MH370 had gone missing,’ she told
the paper. ‘My son-in-law, a policeman, was convinced that I had seen an
aircraft and asked me to lodge a police report the same day. ‘Many of my
friends on the flight doubted me at first, but they are beginning to believe me
now that we know the plane (MH370) turned back and entered the Indian Ocean.’
Many will warn against dismissing Mrs Dalelah’s claims too quickly.
The islands
do lie across a route MH370 could have taken after radar contact was lost and
it would easily have been able to reach them before Mrs Dalelah’s sighting at
2.30pm. After its transponder was turned off at 1.21am on March 8 the plane,
with enough fuel to last 2,500 miles, turned west, following an established
route towards India. An ephemeral satellite ping registered at 8.11am suggested
the plane was heading in one of two directions – south to where the potential
debris was spotted, or north into China and central Asia. The Andaman Islands
lie 890 miles to the north-west of Kuala Lumpur, well within range. Officials
still haven’t ruled out MH370 being found in a northerly location, with
aircraft and ships renewing their search in the Andaman Sea between India and
Thailand on Friday.
Several MailOnline readers, including qualified pilots,
have left comments backing Mrs Dalelah. Chivers49, from Hertfordshire, said:
‘The captain is being arrogant. An aircraft flying at 35,000ft is quite clear
in the sky, so why should it have been “impossible” for her to see a similar
image on the sea?’ And Zen, from Perth, Australia, said: ‘You never know they
should check everything out and not dismiss anything.’ Zeppelinpilot, from
Montreal in Canada, said: ‘Being a pilot for the past 25 years and having flown
in this area a few years ago, this appears to be the best lead received so far.
According to the pilot incapacitation theory, this seems to the most logical
place to look for MH370. We should give full credibility to this eyewitness
account and investigate further on this location.’ Meanwhile, the agency
co-ordinating the exhaustive search operation for MH370 still holds out hope of
finding people alive, as authorities scramble to cover the massive 600,000
square-kilometre (230,000 square-mile) search area.
The Australian Maritime
Safety Authority (AMSA) revealed on Friday that they were preparing for the
remote possibility of a human rescue mission, should the two large objects
spotted by satellite some 2,500 kilometres (1,500 miles) off the coast of Perth
be related to the missing Malaysian Airlines flight.
John Young, the general
manager of AMSA’s Emergency Response Division, said the focus of the massive
search operation – which now includes 29 planes, 21 ships and six helicopters
from more than 20 contributor countries – was first and foremost on trying to
locate the large pieces of debris, one up to 24 metres (78ft) in length, the
other five metres (16 feet). ‘We want to find these objects because they might
be the best lead to where we might find people to be rescued,’ Mr Young said.
‘We have done some work on that area and we’re still focused on that task, to
find people to be rescued.
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