Originally Posted by
Hyperveloce
Hi there,
I would like to submit an idea (for falsification purpose) about a possible clue/signature in the Inmarsat's BFO to decide whether the real underlying trajectory is toward the south or north corridor. My (MonteCarlo) simulations show that while there are some trajectories toward the north able to mimick most of the BFO profile, none is able to generate a doppler peak in the BFO around 120 minutes of flight (labelled "possible turn" by Inmarsat) with the same magnitude like the one observed for the MH370 measured data:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3sr...E9yck1mTWVjNEE
It's a good observation. But I have two points to make:
* If you do a least mean square fit for all points except around 120 min, I think you'll find a scaling factor that is somewhere above 0.25 (not 0.15-0.2), and, at that scaling factor, you can't get the "possible turn" peak to match the data at _any_ heading.
* But if you assume that MH370 was climbing at around 18:25 UTC when the "peak" was observed, you can fit the peak nicely to the course before the turn. Put in something like ground speed 480 kts, heading 285, climb rate 4000 fpm. Recall that the Malaysian military radar picture has a "hole" in the track. It could be consistent with dropping to 5000' above the Strait of Malacca (for whatever reason) and then climbing back out.
BTW, how do you get the 17:07 data point to fit? It's been one of the problems bugging me for a long time. I can force-fit it by setting the heading to 5, but it's pretty artificial because we have the FR24 track up to 17:20 and it is showing straight and level flight at heading 25 from 17:01 to 17:20.