Looking back at cryptic events in our lives we might wonder what might have happened if we had probed a little further on some occasions; made more inquiries to satisfy our curiosity. We usually then dismiss any troublesome thoughts.

Most of us though aren't haunted for years by a memory that's become more worrying with the passing of time.

Take the case of WWII veteran Jack Carter, a rather remarkable man whom I first met in 2019. He once worked at Rathmines, laying down flare paths on Lake Macquarie waters at night so returning Catalina crews after long, dangerous missions could land safely. He'd tried to enlist in the navy but joined the RAAF's Marine Section instead and was later sent to Darwin to support Australia's Catalina flying boat squadrons and for air-sea rescues.

Today's story doesn't concern his war service, however, but it does involve his memory and modern aviation, maybe.

"I don't know what I'm about to tell you is significant or not, but I've been bottling it up for almost eight years," the 96-year-old said ringing from his Elermore Vale home.

READ MORE:

"I've been watching a few recent documentaries on TV about that missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft (MH370) that disappeared over the southern Indian Ocean, they now think.

"The films being shown are very topical with the eight-year anniversary of the mystery coming up (March 8). And for eight years I've been thinking about the possible site of the crash of the plane with all those people aboard and what I saw.

"I hope I'm not just wasting your time, but I once saw this boat where it shouldn't have been, way out in the ocean for no apparent purpose. They just seemed to be hanging around, just waiting, but waiting for what? Someone to land?" Carter said.

"My wife and I had earlier boarded the new ocean liner MS Queen Elizabeth in Western Australia in 2014 to cruise around to Sydney. I'd taken a new pair of binoculars with me to get a better view of things at sea. We were headed south, past Perth, then."

Carter said that not long afterwards all the passengers learned of the mystery of the missing major aircraft, but it was only much, much later that the focus of the search switched to the southern Indian Ocean that they'd once cruised through.

"I did alert the authorities then, but they didn't really get back to me," Carter said.

"What they did indicate was that I might have observed smugglers in a boat, or a dope drop-off, or something like that. But as the weeks went by, I began to worry. One of the first ideas people had was that the aircraft had been hijacked and someone was trying to cover their tracks.

"The boat, a trawler, had two, possibly three people on board I could see. To me it was very suspicious being so far out from land. They weren't fishing as they didn't have their gear out and the water would be way too deep anyway.

"It was late afternoon, about 6pm, still daylight, as we were waiting for dinner at 7pm. That's when I spotted this trawler as I was scanning the horizon with my binoculars for any other shipping.

"There was no ocean debris or anything, just a slight swell.

"My first thought was their boat may have broken down, but they mustn't have asked for any help as we sailed by and they didn't wave at us or anything. The QE was slowly cruising south right out from land to avoid any reefs closer in," Carter said.

"People later found a section of MH370's aircraft's wing (in 2015) off somewhere like Madagascar, near Africa, about 4000 kilometres away from the initial search area. The latest speculation from aviation experts is that the aircraft crash was a murder-suicide plot, possibly by the plane's captain," he said.

But now, some more background. The Malaysia Airlines flight 370 vanished without trace after leaving Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014. It's become one of the world's great aviation mysteries.

The search for the missing aircraft, with 239 passengers and crew, including six Australians, then went on for almost three years. It was officially suspended on January 17, 2017.

Australia led the southern ocean search, with the idea it would be resumed if any new evidence was found of the aircraft's final resting place. Up to $160 million was reportedly spent in the hunt covering 46,000 square nautical miles of remote ocean.

In 2018, a respected oceanographer said the wreck of MH370 might be lying just outside the areas that had been searched.

Then, only three months ago, retired British Aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey claimed he'd found the missing aeroplane after a seven-year study involving radio data, analysis of ocean drift and new technology.

Godfrey said he'd pinpointed the likely wreck location to 1933km west of Perth at a depth of 4000metres on the ocean floor in difficult underwater terrain.

The original search was in the wrong place, focusing on the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam. Aviation detectives have also discovered the missing Boeing 777 aircraft besides unexpectedly turning south west, then due south, also later flew in a big holding pattern, possibly to confuse radar trackers of its whereabouts, for 20 minutes.

Since then, despite wild rumours, 33 pieces of aircraft debris, likely to have been from MH370 steeply crashing into the sea have been recovered after drifting west towards Africa. And Jack Carter's not surprised, saying in the sudden impact of a crash wing parts and landing wheels break off and float away. The surviving body of the aircraft, or fuselage, would simply sink. Today he also keenly feels a personal emotional investment in the MH370 mystery being solved soon.

"Imagine the pain the relatives left are still feeling of not knowing what's happened," he said.

For Carter knows full well the legacy of an airline tragedy after serving in Australia's wartime Top End in 1945.

Working near Truscott, Australia's top secret air base, he once went among mangroves trying to locate the missing bodies of 10 servicemen who died when their B-24 RAAF Liberator crashed in Vansittart Bay while taking off.

"It was a horrible job recovering body parts with all the crocodiles around," he once told me. He has never publicly revealed the grisly details of the task," he said

"That's why this missing Malaysian aircraft has to be found and closure given to the grieving families."