I hadn’t even heard of McKay until reading your e-mail, Hans, but then found it easily on Gawker. I wonder: Is it reasonable that if McKay saw it, he would be the only one to write CNN about it? Also: I found the apparently confirmed e-mail itself here: < http://gawker.com/oil-rig-worker-says-he-saw-flight-370-crash-in-flames-1542... > (scroll down). It says the flames went out in the sky. In fact he says that after 10-15 seconds, “the flames went out — still at high altitude”. My guess: he saw a shiny object in the sky, like a weather balloon, that was reflecting the sun, until it didn’t. Is it believable that a plane burning in the sky could stop burning before it fell? —Dan P.S. I also found CNN to be infuriating with its interviewing a random mix of actual experts and people who obviously have no expertise on the subject of analyzing what may have happened to a missing plane, and/or can’t speak one coherent sentence, as well as CNN’s almost never separating what is known from what is conjecture or what is likely. On Mar 15, 2014, at 8:23 PM, Hans Havermann <gladhobo@teksavvy.com> wrote: . . .
CNN has been infuriating to watch since someone decided that the plane did indeed make a left turn and flew west. The underlying assumption is that the westward-flying plane tracked by military radar was MH370. If someone actually proved that to be the case, they neglected to share it (as far as I am aware) with the general public. However, once that became an accepted fact, the subsequent pings showed that the plane was in the air for six to seven hours, as opposed to (say) on the surface of the ocean somewhere in the South China Sea. The circle was abridged as two arcs, a northerly one and a southerly one. The missing arc between them was in the South China Sea. Presumably it was excluded because why would they fly back to where they came from! Even after it was explained that the arcs represented possible locations at that point in time (8:11 AM, local time 9 March), CNN commentators kept referring to each arc as a "path" (as in flight path), spinning their wild conjectures. I'm on record saying (on Google+) that "I am putting some faith in Mike McKay, the New Zealand oil rig worker who claimed to have seen, off southeast Vietnam, a plane burning in the sky." If I'm wrong, so be it. But in my mind this is still a plausible (if not likely) possibility.