More than a decade after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 mysteriously disappeared with 239 people on board, a New Zealand oil rig worker - Mr. Mike McKay - continued to affirm that he witnessed the final moment of the Boeing 777 on the fateful night of 2014.
Flight MH370 went missing on March 8, 2014 on its way from Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) to Beijing (China). To date, although many large-scale search operations have been launched, the whereabouts of the plane have not been determined, becoming one of the biggest and most shocking mysteries in the history of world aviation.
According to CNN, Mr. Mike McKay (currently 57 years old) said that at the time MH370 lost contact, he was working on the Songa Mercur oil rig. During his nighttime smoking break, he claimed to have seen a plane catch fire at high altitude in the sky.
Mr. McKay said he immediately sent an email to his superiors to report the incident. In the letter, he described "observing a plane catching fire at a high altitude, in a ladder direction from 265 to 275 degrees above the location of the drilling rig".
The email began with the line: "Gentlemen, I believe that I saw the Malaysia Airlines flight crash. Time coincides. I have been trying to contact the Malaysian authorities for the past few days but I don't know if this information has been received or not.
In the next content, Mr. McKay described: "When I observed, the plane seemed intact. From the moment I saw the fire until it went out at high altitude, it lasted about 10-15 seconds. There was no horizontal movement, so the plane may be falling towards us or flying away. The viewing position is perpendicular, southwest of the normal flight path and lower than normal flight paths.
According to Mr. McKay, this email was later leaked to the media, along with information about where he worked, causing him many troubles and eventually losing his job.
I look like an idiot" - he said. "But what happened to me was nothing compared to the pain of families with relatives on that flight. I sent an email hoping it could help them find out the truth.
Mr. McKay admitted that the distance from his observation position to the last announced coordinates of MH370 made many people suspect whether what he saw was actually the missing plane or not.
However, he questioned the information gaps surrounding the incident, including the fact that the plane was believed to have returned to the Malay peninsula, flying over Butterworth Air Force Base and Penang Airport but was almost not detected.
Meanwhile, some international aviation experts continue to put forward different hypotheses. EgyptAir's chief engineer - Mr. Ismail Hammad - said that some debris believed to be MH370 drifted in the ocean showed signs of abnormality, especially the condition of the paint layer not matching the time it was soaked in salt water.
The latest MH370 search effort is being carried out by marine robot company Ocean Infinity earlier this year, but as of January 25, 2026, there are still no results.
