A woman flying over the Indian Ocean back to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, after a pilgrimage claims she saw the missing Malaysian Airlines plane.
"I had seen several shipping liners and islands from my window earlier. Then, I saw the silvery object," Raja Dalelah Raja Latife, a 53-year-old Malaysian woman returning from Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on March 8, told the Star Online. “I took a closer look and was shocked to see what looked like the tail and wing of an aircraft on the water."
“I know what I saw. I am convinced that I saw the aircraft. And I will not lie. I had just returned from my pilgrimage,” she said.
Message card display at a messages board for passengers aboard a missing Malaysia Airlines plane at Kuala Lumpur International Ariport in Sepang, Malaysia, Wednesday, March 19, 2014. New radar data from Thailand gave Malaysian investigators more potential clues Wednesday for how to retrace the course of the missing Malaysian airliner, while a massive multinational search unfolded in an area the size of Australia. (AP/Vincent Thian)
Flight MH370 went missing in the early morning hours of March 8 and no trace of the plane or its more than 200 passengers have been found, despite the round-the-clock efforts of several countries.
Raja Dalelah told the Star Online that according to her in-flight monitor, they were flying over the Indian Ocean at 9:30 a.m. local time when she saw something. She noted that her flight was about an hour past Chennai, India. It wasn't until she landed in Kuala Lumpur that she even learned of the missing plane.
The woman said she told her friends and the pilot what she thinks she saw, but no one took her seriously. By March 14, Raja Daleha filed a police report.
But could she have actually seen the plane from a cruising altitude?
“Along any flight path, especially a long-haul one such as between Jeddah and Kuala Lumpur, the altitude of the plane will be maintained at around 35,000 [feet] once it is in the air,” a pilot, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Star Online. “This is roughly 7 miles above sea level. How can anyone see anything like a boat or ship on the ground from so high up?”
In this handout Satellite image made available by the AMSA (Australian Maritime Safety Authority) on March 20, 2014, objects that may be possible debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 are shown in a revised area 185 km to the south east of the original search area. The imagery has been analysed by specialists in Australian GeoSpacial-Intelligence Organisation and is considered to provide a possible sighting of objects that has resulted in a refinement of the search area. Two objects possibly connected to the search for the passenger liner, missing for nearly two weeks after disappearing on a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, have been spotted in the southern Indian Ocean, according to published reports quoting Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. (DigitalGlobe/AMSA via Getty Images)
Search planes flew out of Australia Friday to scour the seas in one of the remotest places on Earth for objects that may be from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.
In what one official called the "best lead" of the nearly 2-week-old aviation mystery, a satellite detected two large objects floating off the southwest coast of Australia about halfway to the desolate islands of the Antarctic.
The area in the southern Indian Ocean is so remote is takes aircraft longer to fly there -- four hours -- than it allows for the search.
This Friday, March 21, 2014 graphic provided by Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), shows an area in the southern Indian Ocean that the AMSA is concentrating its search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on. Planes are flying out of Australia again to search for two objects detected by satellite that may be debris from a missing Malaysian Airlines jetliner. (AP/Australian Maritime Safety Authority)
A search Thursday with four planes in cloud and rain found nothing, and Australian authorities said early Friday efforts were resuming with the first of five aircraft -- a Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion -- leaving at dawn for the area about 1,400 miles from western Australia.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
(H/T: Daily Mail)
