"
Route change believed programmed into computer
"
This is just a guess and not fact, right? If we don't put emphasis on this point it easily changes what we think happened, doesn't it?
Same for the part about ascending to 45K feet, then descending to 25K (or whatever it was). This seems to have been rumor, not fact. After all, the transponder wasn't working properly, or was turned off, so how could it have relayed this data when they don't even know if the plane went north or south?
The ascending and descending came from military radar (and it is not very accurate about altitude). The north or south question is after the plane went off any known military radar, so there is much less info about the flight then.
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The Indonesian radar seems to be an important question to figuring this thing out. But the Indonesians say they didn't get hits when the plane was spotted by both Malaysian and Thai radar, and this was in an area where Indonesia says it monitors, too. So that is a known example where their radar didn't pick it up when others did.
I'm guessing Indonesian radar capabilities late at night that night just weren't great, imho. Someone was sleeping, lol.
As far as the course of the plane flying over Indonesian airspace, I think it did (over water), and the Indonesian press says: "...The southern corridor begins
west of Banda Aceh and takes in a vast arc past Western Australia into some of the most remote expanse of the Indian Ocean with an average water depth of around 4,000 meters." (
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news...rch-flights-military-pledges-fullest-support/)
West of Banda Aceh means that the flight continued on a line from where the militaries last spotted it out to the west a little bit. If true, the flight could make the turn to the south and get ever farther away from the satellite (once it was off military or civilian radar, which I think is what Inmarsat must have meant).
As far as the
northern route option goes, simply put, I still think you just have too many countries with radar to deal with, particularly China's and India's. Burma might work if it went down/landed there, maybe, imho.
But some of the theories like the Pakistan ones don't work with the Inmarsat data and ping arc at 8:11. If someone can explain how that works out, please post it, because I can't even have the plane getting to the coast of Pakistan and making that ping arc at the right time (unless you fly extensively in Indian air space, which just makes no sense about their radar; they have to watch for incoming nukes, remember).
No, Indonesia not paying attention for a little while to a commercial plane from Malaysia out over their water makes a lot more sense to me. They share a lot of water anyway, and they also don't have big enemies with the same capabilities as Pakistan (for India). So their border alert level could be much different than India's presumed vigilance. That would make sense, imho. They don't need to be very vigilant, not that they'd like to admit that openly