Does anyone know if the Vietnamese or Malaysian ATS declared the first SAR phase on the aircraft, and when ? Once declared, would it not be SOP to alert active or inactive RMAF AD radar ? If not done, this would be one more little question for the Malaysians to answer.
Red arcs, as in .. which one ? There should be no reason why an earlier arc did not correspond to near one of the primary radar paints near Thailand, and using that as a fix, or an area of probability, and knowing the max and min ground speeds to later arcs, it would be possible to resolve the 'true' and 'false' arcs with a set of running fixes (or areas). So why at this stage would the Malaysian government have not removed one arc ?