Then, he needs to give up the details. Or has this mission become wartime operation?

No doubt there is also a INMARSAT ping time radius line at the last known RADAR position, altitude, time and velocity of the missing airliner (A Vector quality) measured by the Malaysian air force. The RADAR measurements will also have a velocity component (speed and direction) and time stamp. Each INMARSAT ping will reveal a time stamped radius calculation for the next vector intersection. Tracking the aircraft should be possible if there is a starting solution.

There should be an easily calculable track of the missing aircraft. Finding the last vector intersection of the final position radius would indicate the last known position on that last radius. There should be a mathematically sound solution, made even easier if the Rolls Royce Data is available for the engine performance.

Again why this has taken 7 days so far? All the electronic data pertaining to the missing aircraft needs to be released publically, the solution of where the aircraft ended up would be computed within hours.

Again it looks like the Malaysian authorities appear to be stalling for time for some reason, despite the denials.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on if INMARSAT is recieving data on the same frequency. Radios only recieve what they are tuned to recieve.

Easily calculable? I seriously question that. Remember, the equipment that sent and recieved the last ping was never designed for this application. The map shows a nice sharp red line. I rather suspect it should be a very wide fuzzy line. Perhaps hundreds of kilometers wide.

It probaby has taken several days because initially the search was focused on the planes planned course from its last known position. No doubt everyone expected it would soon be found, especially after the oil slick was spotted. It no doubt took awhile to realize that the other data was even available, and that it was even possible to use it in this way. Also, that red line(even if it is accurate) only shows where the aircraft could have been at the last ping. Where it ended up could be a good ways away.

I suspect it is rather more likely a result of incompetance, bureaucrtic turf, inertia, and inefficiency in a third world country.

Conspiracy theories are always entertaining. Up thread someone talked of "Evil Geniuses" and "Evil Morons". Applying Occam's Razor I think that simple bungling of a unfamiliar situation is the most likely case.

EDIT:
A link on the satellite pings: Investigators in Jet Search Rely on an Imperfect Tool
James Fallows on conspiricy and hidden landing strips: Malaysia 370 Update: Landing Strips, Cell Phones, and More

A very good point, and one not limited to the "third world." I once worked with a CWO whose favorite saying was: "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."

Many, many, years ago I had to take a course in "crisis management." They emphasised the need to have one focal point (call it a "war room") that all information went into, and was the only place information (to the press, etc.) came out of. The reason was that if you did not do this, all sorts of people and information/misinformation would be going out willy-nilly making your management look incompetent (at best). What is even worse is that an incorrect report from one set of investigators could influence another set of investigators to go off in another direction with their own investigation, and lose time chasing a ghost. Control and dissemination of information is critical in the orderly analysis of such events. You do not want everyone relying on each others unconfirmed data.

I kind of feel the good folks in Malaysia are becoming a case study on how not to handle a crisis.

That does not mean that all the "conspiracy" theories are false, or unworthy of investigation (they are and must be eliminated based on facts, not opinion). Just that while you investigate the facts and develop theories based on these facts, you don't go around saying stuff that later turns out to be wrong, and thus jeopardize whatever credibility you had to start with and possibly send your own investigations in a false direction.

The Malaysian Air Force is not to be confused with the Indian or Russian military. Moreover a flight in the direction shown is obviously no threat to Malaysia but would be highly concerning to everyone else along the way.


Don't assume too much when military secrets are involved. You can get fired - or worse - for releasing what someone else thinks is too much but never for keeping silent.

The radar trace would not have appeared threatening and would have looked like a flight to Europe or India that wasn't on the schedule - the radar trace may have been merely logged, not reported, with nobody realizing it was interesting until later the next day, by which point it was a recovery and not a rescue.

There's a lot of misdirection by others here too, not just Malaysia. I don't believe for an instant that China burned lifespan moving ten very expensive spysats when lives are no longer at stake. And there are lots of curious statements coming from Washington wherein fairly specific claims are made yet there is silence or confusion as to why that statement was made.

All real world data has error bars - the result is never exact. By the time all error bars are considered INMARSAT ping estimates may point to lines hundreds of miles wide, or wider. It's possible the equipment has never been calibrated for this, meaning they won't know how wide the lines even are without careful and slow testing.

I've done some basic calculations regarding ping time resolution regarding the width of the radius line.

A 10 Km difference perpendicular to radius line is around 3-4 microseconds. Assuming the clock resolutions are 1 microseconds based on GPS timing resolution then 1 microsecond would roughly be 3 km wide.

Kuala Lumpur has its own bigger Twin Towers. An aircraft losing Transponder and other communications, to then be picked up on Military RADAR changing course radically to get into the Malacca strait with other commercial airline traffic would look to be very threatening.

ireckon... the Strait of Malacca is much too important a sea lane for us not to have a SIGINT presence.

Why would the INMARSAT system record such precision? It's actually tricky to get sub-millisecond precision accurate ("precision is easy but accuracy is not").

The reason PLB GPS location is imprecise with respect to consumer GPS is because the PLB system doesn't support reporting position with high precision - there aren't that many bits in the message so a PLB just throws away some precision when transmitting.

INMARSAT may have not needed better than 1/10 second precision or worse on such pings.

(What's worst is when the final archival data storage is in a format that allows 10+ digit precision in spite of a "narrowing" effect somewhere along the way. You might see a nice precise-looking number like 12.28393815 without knowing if the was a 1/10 precision bottleneck somewhere buried in the system. Beware strangers bearing precise data!)

The NW path towards India does not head towards Kuala Lumpur. I agree that a flight towards Kuala Lumpur would be interesting if no transponder answered.

Well, I've finally found a link from a source who actually has some real expertise in this technology, and what kind of accuracy might be expected:

Understanding "satellite pings"

It is a rather long article, but well worth reading in it's entirety. Regarding the accuracy of the now famous red line on the map, it says: Note that "100 miles" works out to about 160 km, so my wild guess regarding the accuracy wasn't too far off.

The author Tim Farrar is the founder of TMF Associates which "....is a consulting and research firm based in Menlo Park, CA. We focus on business planning, technical analysis, financial and spectrum valuations and expert witness services in the satellite and telecom sectors and have particular expertise in Mobile Satellite Services (MSS), where we have worked for almost all of the leading operators over the last decade..."