haven't seen any lon/lat, but if not in - are very near the .. Roaring Forties.
the chinese sat photo indicates 90 13' 43" / 44 57' 29". roaring forties it is.

If I were in charge I'd have any nuclear submarines that might be in the IO head down there and start searching for pingers.

The sub is not hampered by heavy weather on the surface so can execute a search pattern at a fair speed as if the seas were calm.(though the sea state would definitely affect the SNR)

But a sub couldn't look for the alleged debris. Just look for the pinger.

Of course Murphy's law might help find the debris as the sub comes to periscope depth and hits it.....

With surface ships from America and China around - and with all of them having underwater listening gear to hear pings - there won't be any subs on the scene. This is not a rescue effort and not worth exposing any secrets.

If there really is a desire and need for a sub search all surface ships in the area will be ordered away first "to avoid surface vessel noise interference". But I doubt it gets to that any time soon.

No way would pilots not report fire first before turning off electrical stuff.

I'm speaking as a former submariner who spent a 6 month deployment in the IO (but not to the southern part of that ocean).

Surface traffic noise would not hamper submerged search.

It's unlikely the Chinese would detect the submarine in the area.

Only issue I can see is if the surface vessels were dragging a towed array then the search areas would have to be deconflicted. Deconfliction in exercises is routine.


No it's not a rescue effort. Now it is an effort to learn whether 777 aircraft are safe to continue flying or whether this was a deliberate act. Either way it's getting mighty expensive.

Boeing 777 aircraft are safe to continue flying; the question is what caused the aircraft to fly until fuel exhaustion in the southern Indian Ocean (assuming that it did in fact go into the southern Indian Ocean). At this point I feel a lot of folks are hoping it crashed in the southern IO and the large search effort is to put minds at rest.

As for submarines -- there may be subs involved in the search, but I doubt it. It's a long way out of the way for assets that are already heavily tasked. But like I said, IMO peeps really do want to find this aircraft, just to be sure.

Malaysian Prime Minister has announced that a novel type of analysis of the Inmarsat data has put the last known location of the MH370 deep in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean, far from any possible landing site.

Presumably, the plane crashed into the ocean.

The families were notified an hour before the annoucement.

INMARSAT has release more information here. The techniques are in fact new and nothing is calibrated. However they analyzed six other flights that day ("predicting the past") and their technique got good enough agreement with the known tracks of those flights to give them confidence here. Good enough for an in-progress recovery anyway.

(neither Digi-Globe or Australia has stated *why* they looked carefully at images that far out in the middle of nowhere)


Why? Reporting then will not help. Even a few more seconds of smoke may well hurt or be fatal.


The "premature turn" story has indeed been reversed.

After reading that the "premature turn" story has been reversed, and the flight computer had NOT been pre-programmed to turn, I have decided I have to stop watching this story.

Everything the media has put out, other than the plane is missing, has been wrong.

I have so little faith that this plane ended up in the South Indian Ocean at this point, that I'm putting in bets it's somehow parked in Iran.

That's what those two Iranians with the false passports get for trying to defect.

And yes.. I am being just a little sarcastic here. This whole story just frustrates me to no end.

In the thread about PLBs in slot canyons I wrote-

"US Navy NAVSAT of the 1970's used observed doppler shift to provide location information to vessels. The rate shape of the frequency shift curve (it would be an S from high to low like listening to a locomotive horn going past you) reveals the distance from the observer to the ground track of the satellite. (still have to choose which side you are on from it)"

This is the principle that INMARSAT folks applied to the flight tracking. Only in this case the satellite was "stationary" and the airplane beacon was moving.

This is quite a feat of measurement considering that the airplane is mostly flying ACROSS the line of sight (from 22,500 miles EVERYTHING is across the LOS!) and the doppler effect only applies to the component of velocity IN the line of sight.

Found an online calculator- assuming 400kt aircraft speed the biggest doppler shift would be 0.27Hz. That's quite a measurement feat!