Response to RichardC10 5/5 post
Apologies for being slow to respond and thank you for your further analysis.
For me, with the official release of the Inmarsat data, the roles of BFO and BTO are a bit clearer. I still think that the inferred location for the first point is somewhat problematic, and I am concerned that this casts doubt on the BFO calibration for the remaining points. The BTO seems a lot clearer, in placing the aircraft on the "ping rings". However, there are a lot of assumptions being made about the aircraft's southerly path that could significantly shift the most likely area along the rings.
On a first principles basis, I am still troubled about the role of probability in the analysis. To be honest, in my opinion, a full "Monte-Carlo" simulation would probably be the best way to go. Since we haven't yet seen the Inmarsat "model", we can't yet tell whether this has been done.