MH370 Eastward Descent After the 6th Arc
Abstract Past analyses of satellite and phone signals from missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 reconciled Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) errors up to the 6th of 7 arcs for a southerly track. After the 6th arc, the Satellite Data Unit (SDU) power-up or reboot resulted in settling errors. Investigators bounded these but needed to invoke a high-speed descent for nominal errors that remained from assuming the southerly track continued to the 7th arc. However, the implied violent-crash site was not found nor supported by damage found on debris, which instead suggested a glided landing. In our reanalysis, we relaxed the south track assumption and used the “Penang Longitude” (PL) theory that predicted a similar southerly track to the 6th arc, and that MH370 subsequently veered eastwards and descended. In essence, we simply replaced the Doppler Shift from vertical motions with horizontal veering of a high-speed aircraft. Our results suggests that veering predicted by the PL theory plus controlled descent plausibly accounts for nominal 7th arc BFO discrepancies. Synergistic resolution of observation by this theory suggests that MH370 did not violently crash at the 7th arc. Instead MH370 headed east towards a glide landing, predicted by the PL theory to be where the longitude of Penang intersects the 33oS latitude at a deep hole. The main lesson to learn is that all plausible scenarios need to be considered for complex high-uncertainty problems.