Passenger who missed Malaysia flight live tweets with loved one

It's hard to describe that sinking feeling one would get when finding out a loved one is aboard a flight that has gone missing. While hundreds of family members cried, wondered and worried about what may have happened in the hours after news broke, one person got a very welcome piece of information over Twitter.

A woman in the U.S. named Cylithria Dubois tweeted the news of the Malaysia Airlines flight going down and then said she was freaking out. She then sent out four tweets over the next hour and a half. Ninety minutes that we can only assume were the longest 90 minutes of her life. Finally, a U.S. businessman named Kaiden IV on Twitter wrote back saying he missed his flight and that he and the person he was travelling with are okay. 

A helicopter prepares to land onboard the China Maritime Safety Administration (MSA) ship Haixun-31 during a brief stop in Sanya in southern China's Hainan province, Sunday, March 9, 2014

Dubois has not responded to media requests for an interview, but released a statementtoday.

"Kaiden is my best friend, my buddy, my guy, He's the man I love with all of my heart, even if I didn't realize it in full, before this. The moment I feared he was gone from earth was excruciating," she wrote on her blog. "There are no words to convey the overwhelming relief or gratitude that flooded me when I saw his tweets to me. When I was able to reach out and touch his cheek, I felt like the most unworthy human in our entire race. My gratitude is that profound." 

Dubois goes on to explain she is deeply sorry for the pain everyone is enduring who is going through what she describes as her "personal  hell." 

(Disclaimer: We can't independently confirm Kaiden missed his flight or the relationship between him and Dubois.)

Here's how it played out.

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15 space organizations join hunt for missing Malaysian jet

China activates an international charter started in 1999 to aggregate global space data from satellites in an effort to locate Malaysian Airlines' flight MH370.

An Indonesian Air Force military surveillance aircraft searches the Malacca Strait for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370

As the latest piece of technology to be enlisted in the search for missing Malaysian flight MH370, satellites have the eyes of the world watching them as they watch us.

On Monday, a crowdsourcing platform called Tomnod, along with parent company DigitalGlobe, launched a crowdsourcing campaign to enlist the help of citizens in scouring satellite images to search for the plane that disappeared on March 7.

China has followed that up by activating the International Charter on Space and Major Disastersto join the hunt on Tuesday. The goal of the charter is to enlist space data from 15 member organizations to provide assistance in the case of a "natural or technological disaster." The charter describes such a disaster as "a situation of great distress involving loss of human life or large-scale damage to property, caused by a natural phenomenon, such as a cyclone, tornado, earthquake, volcanic eruption, flood or forest fire, or by a technological accident, such as pollution by hydrocarbons, toxic or radioactive substances."

Now that the charter has been activated, space scientists around the planet will enlist the satellites available to them to gather images from the suspected area in which flight MH370 disappeared. The hope is that one of those images will pick up something that can direct search and recovery efforts.

Satellites are just one of the tech tools involved in the massive multi-national aircraft hunt that already includes the use of 42 sophisticated ships and 39 high-tech aircraft combing the waters according to the BBC. For example, listening devices are being lowered into the water to pick up the "ping" of the black box, and sophisticated MH60 Seahawk helicopters from the United States are employing Forward Looking Infra-red (FLIR) cameras that arm the searchers with night vision.

The International Charter on Space and Major Disasters was most recently activated on February 13 to help with monitoring the Mount Kelud volcano explosion on the Indonesian island of Java. Prior to that it's been used to monitor flooding, forest fires, snowfalls, cyclones, oil spills and other damaging events around the world. It was also used to assist in recovery efforts from earthquakes, including the one that rocked Japan in March 2011 and caused a devastating tsunami and the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear plant. The charter has been activated 400 times in its history, but Tuesday represents the first time it was called into service to look for a missing aircraft. The only other transportation-related event for which it's been used was to assist in gathering data after a train full of dynamite exploded in North Korea on April 23, 2004.

The charter, which began after Vienna's Unispace III conference in 1999 with three agencies, has grown to its current membership of 15 organizations with the Russian Federal Space Agency being the most recent to join in 2013. Other member organizations include the European Space Agency, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute and China's National Space Administration. The US member organizations include the United States Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. After the charter has been activated, data typically starts coming in within 24 hours, according to a report in Phys.org.

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