CASARA S&R Navigator / Spotter here:

Well, I took a look at those images and have to say that, to my eyes at least, they look more like wave-action. It would be nice to have zoomed-in and consecutive images to see if they changed at all with time.

Tomnod has coverage of the new areas, so if people do have any spare time, PLEASE log-on and give it a shot. :ok:

Just a personal observation - it seems incredible that MAS still has the relatives at KL. The 'expect the worst' message went out days ago and any possible wreckage only confirms a catastrophic crash. Surely the best thing is to get everyone home to calmly wait for the eventual facts to emerge, not this ongoing media circus(?)

Debating fact.
 

Please we do not have any substantial evidence of MH370 climbing to FL450 :(

I suspect that the Inmarsat 'ping' data was a victim of the backlash against the flood of unreliable information coming from the Malaysian authorities. At the time it was first offered, the authorities were under considerable criticism for releasing information one day then retracting it the next. So the first information of any significance was treated with kid gloves.

They don't know that. One, the aircraft in question wasn't fully loaded. Two, no 777 pilot has tried to climb to 45000. Their FMS tells them they can't reach it safely, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have achieved that height if only for a few minutes.

@PPMAGETO

I wonder, why your pic did not get any attention. First time i see the possible position arcs from the former sat-pings too.
What is the origin of this graph, I read BBC based on NTSB?

And big question: why is there no arc for the time 3:11? Aircraft unpowered or position arc identical with the 2:11 or 4:11 arc?

http://www.pprune.org/8390293-post6648.html

captains_log said

we have

- a few released/leaked hits

- Thailand saying it never left their radar (meaning for long, at least) and never crossed into their territory (which means WP start North of border over sea, go south a fair distance and skirt this non-linear border, WP end North of border over sea)

- No other radar hits anywhere anytime after the above series of hits to cross the Peninsula
(...well released hits, at least. There is the possibility some of the more "secrete" locations might have pinged it and they just don't want to publicly let people know said secrete locations are there. Little/No reason not to release hits from known radar locations though, and if one was deliberately trying to avoid radar, the known locations would be the only ones whoever was piloting would know to avoid)

- Governments involved (who have more data than us) saying they interpret everything as deliberate

... if not deliberate, it will probably be unbelievably difficult to come up with a series of events to produce what happened in reality. Would maybe be possible, but that's a possible well down the scale and rather on the verge of impossible

I don't see how it could have been flying HDG. The last 2 pings were at 7:11 and 8:11 on the same 40 degree arc. That implies to me that it flew to a waypoint before 7:11 and went into a holding pattern at it.

Are there any waypoints in the search area that would meet the criteria?

I took a break from following the frenzy of posts some 40 pages ago. Some amazing intelligence on satellites and RF. Very impressive. But I am also amazed by the number of posts from seemingly intelligent and informed people who are STILL advancing theories on decompression, fire or other mechanical failure. At least one major news outlet has been parroting the same unfounded and emotionally driven theories having read them on this site!

US satellite the unspoken source that sparked search

This may inform the debate.

Magnus

I just read that before I came on here. Confirms what John Young didn't say in the PC.

Interesting thing that was said was the re tasking of two satellites to produce high res images
of the area so it will be interesting what they show.

Radar returns
 

With no IFF all supposed radar returns are suspect!

@geneman
Based on the images linked from post 6512 (permalink?) they are sourced from Digital Globe. Coordinates and time are also available in the margins, which have been cropped out in many media articles.

According to the story from post 6636 (permalink?), the suspected debris has been corroborated by more than one satellite. I suspect the released photos were intentionally sourced from civilian data.

Because your map is wrong. Haven't we been through this like 4000 posts ago where the Last Known location was somewhere in the Indian Ocean/Andaman Sea and NOT in SCS?

on the "more satellite images likely" / "satellite images should be very detailed ... look at Google's images!" thing, I just want to throw this out

Remember, Google has plenty of time to take as many detailed shots as they like. They can zoom in the focus to get the best possible image - they know what they are going for, and know it aint gonna be moving anytime soon

This isnt quite the case here though. They are searching Thousands of miles, in a quick time period, on a moving surface

These images were from 4 days ago already. They are likely a portion of multiple snaps as the entire region was being quick scanned at a resolution high enough to spot something, low enough to allow for the entire area to be hit with said images to be gone over. They likely made a few passes, but I doubt there was a ton of them. There likely isn't a more zoomed in snap of this as they didn't know for a couple days to even zoom in a shot right there; there was that much area being searched.

At this point (and really, since they started narrowing down the search to smaller and smaller areas) they have probably been taking higher resolution zoomed in snaps. But this is 4 days later, that debris possibly isn't even there anymore so who knows if they have even been able to find it once again on another satellite image.

Not saying they don't have more images, they very well could. And not saying this is exactly the resolution - I imagine they may have blurred it little. But I doubt there are images anywhere near the resolution we would see of say, the released images of suspicious whatever peaking out of the sand in Afghanistan cira-2002, let alone anything close to the Google like "omg, I can see the gnome on my lawn!" type snaps.

IMO, at least

RetiredF4Please lets not start a whole new cascade of misunderstanding based on casual reading of PPMAGENTO's map. The arcs other than the red one at 8.11 are GUESSES. No such arc information has been released

Seriously, unless I have missed something, only ONE ping has ever been released, though the existence of more (5?) unreleased ones has been hinted but not confirmed. And we might assume that those involved have used them to "fit the dots" and refine their predictions. (e.g. the Aussie search area ?). But we can't be sure, I think, and we don't have them ourselves. So not released or leaked. Not the ping angles.

I fully agree. With terabyte SSDs consumer items there is no excuse for being this parsimonious. I would think the only excuse is that by comparison to previous recording systems the current CVR/DFDR are an improvement. However, even carrying the recordings is now becoming obsolete with recording to 'the cloud' being perfectly feasible. And had that been the case with MH370 this thread would have been considerably shorter and a lot of anguish would have been spared.

MagnusP
I don't really think so.
This is media garbage.
These images are not from a sensitive US source (implied "governmental") whose identity needs protecting. They are from a commercial organisation that proudly plasters its copyright notice in the corner of each. The very organisation that proudly claims it immediately manoeuvred its satellites to get the original South China Sea images that appeared so promptly on their own crowd-sourced photo search engine Tomnod.

The published images have a Digital Globe stamp, and appear to match Digital Globe satellite performance, so there's no reason to suspect those images came from a more expensive Three Letter Agency's resources.

Hopefully much more did, on which the Australians' seemingly confident despatch of ships and aircraft was based. The best indication of where it was at would be if a radar satellite pass had caught it in flight. Then the speed, direction and link to the red arc would be assured, if not publicly known.

Or was the aircraft excursion on Plan A, skirting Indonesia and Thai airspace and then something else happened that resulted in a turn on to south?

Postulating: the aircraft was under control for the first part of the excursion by, let us suppose, a hijacker. Then, while heading NW, something happened to disable the hijacker and this resulted in the turn south. At this point there was no competent pilot available to control the flight.

Sat res.
 

@'DS';- you talked about satellite resolution with regard to Google. Sure, the high-level stuff is from satellites. However, all the detailed, zoomable stuff is from normal, coventional aerial-photography. If Google satellites were THAT good, the military wouldn't need their own assets...!