KUALA LUMPUR, March 8 — Search and rescue efforts for the missing MH370 grow increasingly futile as night advances, and reports are now streaming in of an alleged sighting of a 12-mile (19.3km) long oil slick in the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam.
According to the New York Times’ report from Hong Kong, the oil slick could be the first sign that the Boeing B777-200 aircraft carrying 239 people had indeed gone down in the sea off the coast of Vietnam.
“An AN26 aircraft of the Vietnam Navy has discovered an oil slick about 20 kilometres in the search area, which is suspected of being a crashed Boeing aircraft — we have announced that information to Singapore and Malaysia and we continue the search,” Lai Xuan Thanh, the director of the Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam was reported as saying in the news report.
Thanh reportedly said the oil slick looked closer to Vietnam than it did to Malaysia.
It has been over 20 hours since the plane last communicated with the Subang Air Traffic Control, and many continue to speculate the plane has crashed in the Gulf of Thailand, some 250km south of Vietnam.
The last coordinates where the aircraft was last heard at 1.30am this morning puts it somewhere 120 nautical miles off Kota Baru.
