Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

[Double07]

Search Strategy

Australian Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston announced on April 6 that the Australian vessel Ocean Shield detected two pingers in the water and showed a map displaying the location of the sighting as S21°E104°. The map also showed the location of the sighting by the Chinese vessel HaiXun01 as S25°E101°, and showed that the two sightings were about 600 km apart. A map supplied later by the Australian government showed the same two sightings as lying on an arc going from northeast to southwest that corresponded to “satellite handshake calculation number 7”, which was made from the Inmarsat satellite data corresponding to the last partial ping of flight MH370. The aircraft is believed to have gone down somewhere along this arc, with slower air speeds corresponding to locations further northeast, and faster air speeds corresponding to locations further southwest.
It is interesting that there is an air route that passes between these two points on its way to Perth, route L894, as determined by waypoints POLUM at S19°59.95' E98°32.91' and NINOB at S26°0.15' E106°28.84. This air route happens to be the most southern of all air routes in the south Indian ocean and passes from northwest to southeast on its way to Perth. Is it possible that flight MH370 was on this air route just before ditching when its fuel ran out? If it had been flying by waypoints from POLUM to NINOB, this would have been consistent with using waypoints to fly from VAMPI to IGREX over the Andaman sea, and possibly also from IGARI to VAMPI to pass over the Malaysian peninsula. It would also have been consistent with using waypoints to fly around the Indonesian peninsula on its way south from IGREX to avoid Indonesian radar. If one assumes that MH370 used a waypoint like NISOK to avoid Indonesian radar on its way south from IGREX, then one can construct a flight plan consisting of the waypoints WMKK PIBOS GUNBO IKUKO IGARI VAMPI GIVAL MAPSO IGREX NISOK POLUM NINOB and determine how long it might take to get from Kuala Lumpur to the area between POLUM and NINOB. When you do this, you find that the flight time from Kuala Lumpur to NINOB is 7 hours and 52 minutes at 430 knots, which compares quite closely to the actual 7 hours and 54 minutes flight time determined by the 0:25 a.m. departure time and the 8:19 a.m. time of the last partial ping. Allowing for the possibility of additional waypoints between IGREX and NINOB would mean a longer flight distance, which would mean that the aircraft did not quite reach NINOB, but instead went down somewhere on the flight path between POLUM and NINOB. This, of course, assumes an airspeed of 430 knots. A faster air speed would have caused the plane to come down further southeast along the air route, and a slower air speed would have caused the plane to come down further northwest along the air route.

If one combines the Inmarsat data with the assumed flight path data, one gets two lines which intersect at nearly a 90° angle. The intersection point is almost exactly half way between the two ping sightings by the Chinese vessel HaiXun01 at S25°E101° and the Ocean Shield at S21°E104°. This means that the most likely place where MH370 went down is approximately S23°4.24’ E102°27.58’, which is the only point to lie on both the 40° arc and the L894 flight path. Given the short time remaining in the pinger lifetime, it would be well worth searching around this location.