Ercan Karakas, an airline captain, captured a similar image in Istanbul in January 2012. “I’m a spotter. I love to watch and photograph the takeoffs of heavy aircrafts,” he wrote of the experience. “I know they are not a metal, flying bird; they connect thousands of people in a journey to happiness.”
When Flight 370 went missing, Kullenberg and Karakas were among the plane spotters who checked their trove of images. Several found they had photos of the plane when they discovered the registration number matched. Flight 370 was airplane 9M-MRO. These spotters’ fantastical musings of planes in flight turned suddenly to dark speculation.
“I fly 60 to 90 times a year; how could this happen?” asked Hansueli Krapf, a Swiss businessman who captured 9M-MRO sitting on the runway in South Africa two years ago. “What on earth could have happened to a plane when there is so much tracking?”
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Flight 370: High-tech search tools
Inside the flight simulator
Read the cockpit transcript
