So close to safety, new paper raises but doesn't answer question why MH370 flew near so many good opportunities for an emergency landing

It’s been apparent for some months now that the ATSB will mount a follow up search for MH370 (subject to government approvals) if the current priority search zone in the south Indian Ocean is exhausted without a discovery between now and next February.

The most tangible evidence of this was the pile of buoys intended to be released in the current search zone next March by the ATSB in an illustrated story it gave to the foreign media in apparent disgust with coverage by News titles in this country.

(That was petulant and ill-advised in this reporter’s opinion, even though News has published a long string of unfair and fundamentally ignorant articles about MH370 and the ATSB’s role.)

Overnight the highly credentialed MH370 researcher Richard Godfrey has added to the work the ATSB might usefully consider in planning for the post southern SIO phase in this paper published on Duncan Steel’s IG or Independent Group archive site.

It’s conclusion is that MH370 flew past a series of possible emergency landing sites, rejected all of them for reasons unknown, and crashed at a location near 23 degrees South by 102 degrees East close to the seventh arc of possible locations of the Boeing 777 when it was sending signals to an Inmarsat satellite parked over the western Indian Ocean.

That’s a good nine degrees of latitude even further north of the current priority search ‘hot spot’ than proposed by Michael Gilbert, an Australian researcher, in his closely argued and very substantive case for the crew being overcome by the consequences of a windshield fire in missing Malaysia Airlines flight which disappeared with 239 people on board on March 8, 2014.

Mr Gilbert’s paper is linked to and discussed in this earlier Plane Talking post.

While both papers take totally different pathways to analysing the MH370 mystery, and remain a long way apart in their further search suggestions, they add to work that strongly suggests the jet, which had been on a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing came down after exhausting its fuel well to the NE of the current incomplete southern Indian Ocean sea floor search.

To a curious layperson, Mr Gilbert’s windshield fire hypothesis could have identified the cause of a sudden and overwhelmingly serious crisis that caused MH370 to fly toward and past a set of plausible emergency landing options.

Going to the wider view in which the ATSB has been unfairly demonised for its management of the search for MH370, those criticisms fail to understand the history of this epic mystery nor the necessity for continued learning and refinement of modelling seeking to define the best places to focus search resources.

The ATSB has been doing the best it possibly can with the resources it has been given and the analysis brought to bear on the likely movements of the jet after it suddenly diverted from its filed flight plan when it was over the Gulf of Thailand and about to enter Vietnam’s air traffic control jurisdiction.

Critics of these efforts rarely exhibit any understanding of the maths and physics involved in formulating the search targets. The media of the day wants it all sorted and wrapped in a few hundred words, or narrated to dramatic and indignant voice inflections with a bit of scary music in the background.

MH370 killed 239 people when it came down, in a place we haven’t found for reasons yet to be established. It deserves better and more respectful consideration than it has been given by my trade, the reporting of news and analysis.

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