A decade after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished into the night sky, a lone eyewitness account is again ricocheting through the mystery’s echo chamber — a claim of a burning aircraft seen streaking above the South China Sea, reported by an oil-rig worker who says it cost him his job.
Mike McKay, 57, a New Zealand national stationed on the Songa Mercur rig off Vietnam on March 8, 2014, insists he witnessed an aircraft ablaze at altitude in the moments before MH370 disappeared from civilian radar.
The Boeing 777, bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard, would go on to become aviation’s most haunting riddle.
McKay says he’d stepped out for a cigarette on the rig’s deck when he spotted what he describes as “a plane on fire,” an object that held his gaze for seconds before the flames vanished.
Believing he had seen something critical, he alerted his supervisors in an email he thought would discreetly aid search teams and grieving families.
“Gentlemen. I believe I saw the Malaysian Airlines flight come down. The timing is right. I tried to contact Malaysian and Vietnamese officials several days ago. But I do not know if the message has been received.
“While I observed (the plane) it appeared to be in one piece. From when I first saw the burning (plane?) until the flames went out (at high altitude) was 10-15 seconds.
“There was no lateral movement so it was either coming toward our position stationary (falling) or going away from our location.
“The general position of the observation was perpendicular/south-west of the normal flight path and at a lower altitude than the normal flight paths.”
The correspondence leaked almost immediately — along with McKay’s name, location, and employer. He was soon jobless.
“Of course, I ended up looking like a fool,” he said later, adding that any personal fallout “is of no consequence compared to those who lost family.”
Yet he has never withdrawn his account, nor his frustration at what he sees as unanswered questions: why radar data was delayed by nearly a week, how the jet crossed the Malay Peninsula unnoticed, and why debris analyses have been so limited.
His doubts extend even to the official search arcs: “If the data is to be believed,” he said, “the break-up could have been in the South China Sea or just south of Sumatra — not off the west coast of Australia.”
Renewed Search Hopes — Another Theory Emerges
Vietnamese authorities scrambled aircraft in response to McKay’s 2014 report, but the search ultimately pivoted far from his sighting. More than a decade on, fresh attempts continue to falter.
Marine-robotics firm Ocean Infinity abruptly suspended its renewed hunt in April. Malaysia’s Transport Minister, Anthony Loke, told AFP the pause was seasonal, adding that the mission is expected to resume toward the end of the year.
Yet amid the logistical ebb and flow, a new voice has entered the debate. Ismail Hammad, chief engineer at EgyptAir, claims the global search effort may be fundamentally misdirected.
Hammad argues that images of purported aircraft debris raise red flags — specifically the condition of the paint, which he says appears too pristine for metal supposedly steeped in salt water for years.
He insists he has a solution that could “save everyone money and time” and finally pinpoint MH370’s final resting place.
Hammad told Tech Business News, “If the Malaysian government insists on resuming the search off the coast of Perth for the third time, it should at least do the right positive thing by taking into account the deviation of the plane’s magnetic compass to estimate the intended search area first”,
“The deviation between the aircraft’s magnetic compass and true north must be carefully calculated, because magnetic compasses on aircraft are calibrated only to magnetic north.” said Hammad
“And surely, there was no one on board the doomed plane who was dedicated to correcting this deviation in the magnetic compass, or who even cared to do so.”
“That deviation, resulting from a continuous seven-hour flight from the Malacca Strait to the aircraft’s final point, would trace a logical arc southward into the Indian Ocean — not in the previously searched deep areas offshore of Perth or in the 6,000-meter depths of Broken Ridge.”
“But that will converge on a corridor just offshore and near to the western Australian coast, a relatively shallow zone where debris could be near the ocean surface or by sonar-detectable with existing technology,”
“This will minimise both costs and time. This is not guesswork — it is an engineering inevitability if we follow fundamental aviation principles.”
“We did not find any signs of damage that would indicate the fuselage crashed into turbulent waters near Réunion Island or the eastern coast of Africa.”
“We also have not identified any dents, soot, or dark discoloration on these pieces that would suggest an explosion of the tanks,”
“I think that the compass drift value in combined with the fuel consumption equations and the data of Inmarsat satellite handshakes will narrow the official search arc area to nearly 10% and minimise the cost,”
“Relying solely on Inmarsat satellite signals has trapped the investigators in a decade of confusion,” said Hammad
“If we assume that the aircraft completed its path to the south by relying solely on its gyro-stabilised magnetic compass for heading, and deliberately flew without the autopilot to evade detection, then it would have been navigating by basic dead reckoning toward its final resting place.” he said.
Whether his theory gains traction or joins the towering pile of conjectures surrounding the world’s most perplexing aviation disappearance remains to be seen.
