- Sputnik International
World
Get the latest news from around the world, live coverage, off-beat stories, features and analysis.

SERIOUS FLAW Reportedly Exposed in Radar, Satellite Data Use During MH370 Search

© AFP 2023 / Hoang Dinh Namcrew member checking a map during a search flight some 200 km over the southern Vietnamese waters off Vietnam's island Phu Quoc on March 11, 2014 as part of continued efforts aimed at finding traces of the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370
crew member checking a map during a search flight some 200 km over the southern Vietnamese waters off Vietnam's island Phu Quoc on March 11, 2014 as part of continued efforts aimed at finding traces of the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 - Sputnik International
Subscribe
The decision to combine satellite and radar data in order to deduce the missing plane’s flight path might’ve been a bad idea, as the investigators apparently chose the wrong starting point for their calculations, an expert claims.

Investigators looking into the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines’ Boeing 777 airliner which vanished in 2014 with 227 passengers and 12 crew members aboard might’ve made a serious error while trying to use incompatible satellite and radar data to try and find the missing plane, the Daily Express reports, citing an anonymous air safety expert from Brussels.

An unidentified woman wearing a mask depicting the flight of the missing Malaysia Airline, MH370, poses in front of the wall of hope at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, Malaysia, Monday, March 17, 2014 - Sputnik International
World
MH370: How a Cargo of Fruit and Batteries Could Have Downed the Doomed Plane
As the newspaper explains, investigators attempted using the so called communication “handshakes” exchanged between Flight MH370 and a satellite owned by British company Inmarsat to track the plane after radars lost track of it, using an arc comprised of seven such “handshakes” to “trace a predicted flight path”.

However, the investigators apparently used “the last radar point instead of the first satellite data point” in order to fit both the satellite and the radar data, which was a mistake, the expert argued, claiming that the Australian Transport Safety Bureau previously admitted that radar and satellite evidence “could not be used in conjunction”.

"The June report avoided discussion of possible manoeuvres between the 6.22 pm UTC last radar point and the 7.41 pm UTC arc point, except for range estimates, due to the large number of possible scenarios", the expert explained. "The analysis instead used starting locations on the 7.41 pm arc, which were able to be reached from the last radar fix using reasonable flight speeds".

The expert argued that “this is a smoking gun” which “admits the first 6.26 pm handshake arc and the 6.22 pm last radar point are incompatible”.

"This can only be if the arc theory is flawed or if the last radar point is wrong," they remarked. "As the whole search was based on the use of the satellite arc, it is inconceivable that the arc theory is flawed. Therefore one must conclude that the last radar point is incorrect."

READ MORE: Hacker Claims MH370 Could Be Compromised by Computer ‘Nerd’

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished above the South China Sea while en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur in March 2014, after making a leftward detour and flying toward the Indian Ocean; large-scale search operations launched after the plane’s disappearance have yielded no results.

Newsfeed
0
To participate in the discussion
log in or register
loader
Chats
Заголовок открываемого материала