Path to the Cocos

So, the simulator points found on Shah's shadow drive (and deleted) are quite interesting, and beg for an explanation. Recently Iannello and Godfrey speculated that the terminal points (~45S ~104E) might have been the result of selecting McMurdo Station in Antarctic as a destination. Of course, the aircraft ran out of fuel before reaching McMurdo at the 45S 104E points found on the simulator. The question addressed by Iannello and Godfrey is where would MH370 terminate on the 7th arc using McMurdo as a destination. That work can be found here.

Iannello and Godfrey - McMurdo

Another way to look at the same question is to postulate that the Cocos were used as a destination in Shah's simulation, and the aircraft simply continued past the Cocos and ran out of fuel. This short note takes a quick look at how that scenario plays out.

The track, great circle, from the 19:40 range ring to the Cocos is shown below (green line). The track was extended past the Cocos maintaining the great circle trajectory,

The small "star" North and West of the "4" range ring marker denotes the Cocos.

For simplicity a fixed ground speed of 480knots and a fixed track of 169 degrees was used to create the path.  The details associated with this choice are shown in the spreadsheet below. A late FMT was used in this path as was used by Iannello and Godfrey.

Obviously refinements can (and should) be made using wind, mach number, air temperature, and magnetic heading (as opposed to true track) after the Cocos. Those refinements can be added later. This effort was intended to be a "quick look".

As is my custom, I stopped the calculations at 00:11. The 00:11 location is 27.1S and 101.1E. The Iannello and Godfrey 00:11 location using McMurdo station as a destination is 26.08S 100.36E.  I would characterize the BFO errors associated with the Cocos destination as comparable to the errors obtained by Iannello and Godfrey using McMurdo as a destination.

It should be noted that if the great circle is extended to ~45S the corresponding latitude is ~105E.

Update: 24 November 2016

A recent publication by Mike Chillit suggests a terminus near the Batavia Seamount based on flight path and drifter considerations. That paper can be found at the link below.

Mike Chillit - Batavia Seamount

A screen capture of a graphic from the linked paper shows the suggested terminus below.

The Batavia Seamount location (25.75S 100.33E) is added to my flightpath derived above in the graphic below. The Batavia Seamount is approximately 80nm North of my derived terminus.

An interesting take-away from the Chillit paper is the drifter data he includes. I had not seen or been aware of this data previously. It certainly lends credibility to the terminal locations above.

A close-up of the above with the Iannello and Godrey McMurdo based terminus (pin labeled I&G) is shown below.

Drifter summary from referenced Chillit post.