PETALING JAYA: A British sailor has stepped forward to shed new light on the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Katherine Tee, 41, who was sailing from Cochin, India to Phuket with her husband, Marc Horn, 50, has filed a report saying she saw what looked like a plane on fire crossing the night sky with a plume of black smoke trailing behind.

Lee, from Liverpool, said she was alone on deck (apart from a sleeping crew member) at the time. Her husband, she said, was asleep below deck.

Speaking to the Phuket Gazette, she said she saw something that looked like a plane on fire.

“That’s what I thought it was. Then, I thought I must be mad ... it caught my attention because I have never seen a plane with orange lights before.

“I noticed the outline of a plane and it looked longer than planes usually are. Also, there appeared to be black smoke streaming behind,” she said.

She said there were two other planes passing well above it, moving the other way.

“They had normal navigation lights and I remember thinking that if it was a plane on fire, the other aircraft would report it,” she said.

She said when she first saw the object, it was approaching to cross behind the yacht from the north, and moved across later to the south.

Tee said she kept her experience to herself.

“My husband and I had been at sea for about 13 months at that time.”

When the couple arrived in Phuket on March 10, they heard of the MH370 tragedy and Tee told local yachties what she thought she saw while en route to Phuket.

“Some suggested I should say something, that what I saw might have been it. Others said that the flight was heading toward Vietnam. Plus, I wasn’t sure of the date or time of the sighting. I am still not.

“I thought what I saw would [be of little help], and be dismissed with the thousands of other sightings that I assumed were being reported. I thought the authorities would be able to track the plane’s GPS log, which I assumed was automatically transmitted, or something like that.

“I didn’t think anyone would believe me when I myself was having trouble believing my own eyes.

“I didn’t even consider putting out a Mayday at the time. Imagine what an idiot I would have looked like if I was mistaken. So I dismissed it.”

However, after hearing a news report last Saturday explaining that a survey ship involved in the search for flight MH370 was returning to port due to technical problems, Tee began reviewing her yacht’s log.

“The first time I told my husband was after hearing the radio report. That is when we checked our GPS log and realised that perhaps I really did see it,” she said.

After Horn posted data maps of the yacht’s route across the ocean on yachting website Cruisers Forum, the couple discovered that their 40-foot sloop was in the vicinity of one of the projected flight paths for MH370.

The flight path was estimated during the initial search period, after experts realised that Malaysian defence forces had ascertained a “ping” that could have been the ill-fated aircraft.

A Cruisers Forum member recreated a map by using Google Earth, showing the yacht’s position compared with the projected flight path for MH370. The map showed the aircraft would have passed the yacht just as Tee remembered it.

“This is what convinced me ... to file a report with the full track data for our voyage to the relevant authorities,” Tee said.

The couple last Saturday filed the report with the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), the organisation tasked with coordinating the search for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, and followed up with a second email to the JACC on Monday.

“Will this help the families get closure? I have no idea. All I can confirm is that I have since learnt that we were in the right place at the right time, so it seems possible. But I chose to sweep it under the carpet and now I feel really bad.

“Maybe I should have had a little more confidence in myself. I am sorry I didn’t take action sooner.”

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This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on June 4, 2014.