Originally Posted by
smiling monkey
Nice work. Your assumption about the flight path taken, is very plausible as well, as it would be much more convenient to enter a set of waypoints to navigate by than use Heading Select mode (obviously). Your other assumptions also seem to all line up, so hopefully the team at JACC/AMSA are thinking on the same wavelength as you.
There are two air routes in the area. One, as mentioned by Double07, is L894. The other is further north, M641 through IKASA and UXORA.
Haixun 01 reported hearing pings ~150 nm off L694. Ocean Shield heard them almost directly (within 20 nm) underneath M641. They are so far apart that it's impossible for the same pinger to be heard in both places. If we assume that MH370 was following air routes (not an unreasonable assumption), it's more likely that it was on M641, Ocean Shield's report is the real deal and Haixun's report is false.
It's also possible that Australians thought of this before us, and that they were checking that spot precisely because it is at the intersection of an Inmarsat arc and a flight corridor. (Otherwise the chances of stumbling on a working pinger in the amount of time they spent working with a TPL are too vanishingly small.)
M641 is a priori more likely than L694. If you were going to fly from Strait of Malacca to Perth while following flight corridors and waypoints all the way through, NILAM KALOX IKASA is the shortest route. Timing is wrong (it gets you to the supposed crash site in under 5 hours unless you go <400 kts). Double07's proposed route does a better job of avoiding Indonesia, but it involves a lot of unnecessary and complicated zigzagging and it's still a bit too short.
In either case, logic is still missing in action (what else is new?) Is this not a suicide but a spectacularly botched hijacking to Australia now? IGARI to Learmonth (NW Australia) is 4 hours at cruise speed if you don't try to avoid any radars and simply head south. Running out of fuel and ditching in the ocean because you chose a route that takes nearly twice that time would be head-scratching, to say the least.
And finally, there's Doppler. I'm not too confident in any reconstructions or interpretations of Doppler any more, but I don't think that either of those routes agree with it.