Originally Posted by
Pontius Navigator
Portmaneau, what I said was to explain why arearadar essentially kept repeating the question - certain or probable.
I agree with your definition, the various facts, and lack of facts, all add up to create the picture.
For an air traffic controller however they need to be 100%. In the absence of SSR they will ask for a position check or request an ident turn etc,
Even that has on occasion been less than 100% where another aircraft has inadvertently performed a similar manoeuvre and been mis-identified.
This is all correct but the case of a controller identifying an aircraft in real time and the forensic technicians gathering data from recorded tapes are significantly different.
The controller has to take on the aircraft with no appreciable delay and be (in their own mind) certain that they have identified the correct aircraft. The technicians and controllers studying the recorded tapes of radar returns have as much time as they need, can access better or amplified / cleaned data, can work out the speeds of aircraft and attempt to account for every return on a screen in order to rule out other aircraft.
I would think that the airspace over Malaysia at 1am is relatively quiet and most aircraft are the expected routine flights that anyone who works in an area for a time expects to see. I doubt very much that it is like the fabled Midland Radar overhead on a busy day. That being the case there would have been few
if any primary responses that could be confused with MH370. Then the inquiry would have access to recordings from the various militaries that provided information and this information would be overlaid on the civil radar pictures. We in the peanut gallery will not be shown this.
If the inquiry team then believe that they have followed MH370 in the left turn back across the peninsula then a right up the Malacca straits followed by two left turns to go around Indonesia - then we can't disagree with them we do not have their information.
The important issue here is that if the aircraft did fly that very indirect route, it is unlikely that it was doing so after the flight deck was abandoned as some capable human inputs would be required. Then the following 6 hours of cruise flight also show that the aircraft was airworthy and not badly damaged.