Where Is Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370?

Ping Rings from the Inmarsat-3F1 Data | Duncan Steel

A number of questions have come up over the last week or so regarding the pings from the Inmarsat satellite that gave rise to the findings about the corridors as well as the conclusion raised by the Malaysian authorities that the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean.

Space scientist Duncan Steel has been discussing these pings on his blog, firstly noting the frustration of not having this information publicly available for crowdsourced investigative purposes:

Most readers will be aware that there is, shall we say, considerable unhappiness amongst many of us concerned about the apparent loss of MH370 with regard to the lack of publicly-available data from the Inmarsat-3F1 satellite. I have discussed this in previous posts, and in amongst the comments and emails received many people have expressed their outrage at the situation. If the data were available then a crowdsourced attack upon the problem of narrowing down the search region would be feasible, and recent history has shown how powerful crowdsourcing can be: there are many people out there with useful skills who could work together over the internet so as to generate perhaps useful outcomes.

However, it appears that the powers-that-be prefer to preserve their power, to the detriment of the search programs and also the suffering friends and families of the passengers and crew, and others. I would hope that this will backfire in the faces of the culprits; to the best of my knowledge, the major offender is the UK Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) of the Department for Transport.

He then discusses some of the data he and other peer scientists have been trying to work with to reverse-engineer MH370’s flight path, and then points to two posts by Reddit user GlobusMax with reverse-engineered data leading to possible ping information (plus a lot of sources):

Steel highly recommends the data as solid, and given his extensive background in space science I am inclined to trust some of his instincts (though I was not able to find information on GlobusMax’s background and am a little dubious of his credibility given some of his speculation).

That said, Steel’s post gives some great analysis on the ping data as well as some discussion on flight paths, so if you’re looking for some credible scientific discussion on possible pathways for MH370 I recommend this as a resource.

Once again, neither A nor I are science professionals ourselves and can’t personally verify this data, so I’m mostly going by his posted credentials. (Notable to me is that he is one of the few people whose analysis I’ve seen shared around that has actually been very upfront and thorough about his background, including posting a full CV.)

– T