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.