KUALA LUMPUR, June 8 — An oil-rig worker from New Zealand lost his job after reporting a sighting of what may have been the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 off the coast of Vietnam, as reported by the Sunday Star-Times.
Mike McKay, who was working on the Songa Mercur oil rig off the Vietnamese coast in March, sent an email to his employers after a sighting of what he believed to be a burning plane.
Rig operator Idemitsu and McKay’s contractor and rig owner Songa Offshore, were inundated with inquiries after his email was leaked to the media.
“This became intolerable for them and I was removed from the rig and not invited back,” he said, as quoted on the newspaper report published on stuff.co.nz. McKay said that M-I Swaco, the subcontractor he was working under, released him from his contract five days early it had a local-salary engineer to take his place.
McKay said he saw what he believed to be a burning plane at high altitude, which appeared to be in one piece.
“I believe I saw the Malaysian Airlines plane come down. The timing is right,” he added.
He describe his exact location on the oil rig, the compass bearing of where the plane was in relation to the rig, the approximate distance of the plane from the rig, the surface current and wind direction in his email, saying that the plane was off the normal flight path, because “we see the contrails every day”.
He gave his statement to the Vietnamese officials responsible for the early search for the plane, who were going to act on his sighting before the search was moved to the Andaman Sea two days later.
After his return to New Zealand, he also gave a statement to the New Zealand police for Interpol.
He said neither the Malaysian nor Australian search teams had been in touch since he gave his statement.
The Australian-led Joint Agency Coordination Centre said on May 29 that the first phase of the search had ended with no trace of the plane.
The search will enter a new phase covering a 60,000 square kilometre area along MH370’s probable flight arc over the southern Indian Ocean, but only after a bathymetric survey map of the sea floor is completed within a three-month window.
The ongoing search for flight MH370 is considered the longest and most expensive in the world’s aviation history, with the Reuters news agency estimating costs to have hit RM141 million for the first month alone.
The Boeing 777 jet, which was carrying 239 people on board, disappeared on March 8 after the plane veered from its Beijing-bound flight path and flew in the opposite direction towards the southern Indian Ocean.
