MH370 hijackers left fake southern data trail

[mralstoner]

... the author of the first link clearly forgot about Indian and Pakistani radars that would be covering the air above Kashmir. Given the proclivity of both those countries to fight over that territory, their lack of scrambling jets would indicate to me that the author has the course wrong, if not the entire guess.

I guess it depends how close to the borders they flew. From Jeff's website:

http://jeffwise.net/the-spoof-part-3-whe...-scenario/

As depicted, MH370 would have passed over the Andaman Islands about half an hour after disappearing from Malaysian radar. The islands belong to India, which maintains a radar station there. So why didn’t it pick up MH370? The answer, apparently, is that the radar is only turned on when a crisis is looming, which wasn’t the case on March 8. “We operate on an ‘as required’ basis,” the chief of staff of India’s Andamans and Nicobar Command told Reuters.

From there, MH370’s straight-line track would have taken it over Gorakhpur, India, and then on into Nepalese airspace. Nepal is a small, poor country, with no urgent concerns about aerial attack from India; radar coverage is most likely nonexistent. Ahead, however, would have lain some of the most disputed territory on earth. India and Pakistan have been in a state of semi-war over disputed Kashmir for more than half a century. India painstakingly monitors its border with Pakistan and frequently intercepts civilian aircraft that stray into its airspace without having processed the proper paperwork.

Likewise, China and India have been rivals since time immemorial, and fought a border war in 1962. In the months before MH370 disappeared, China had unilaterally declared control of airspace over disputed islands claimed by Japan, and has aggressively intercepted aircraft attempting to enter it.

To pass over any of these disputed areas, or to penetrate Chinese airspace, would be to invite detection and interception. But the ping-ring data suggests that MH370 didn’t fly over any of them. Instead, a straight-line course that begins near the plane’s last known location and intersects the ping-arcs at the correct speeds will pass over the borders between these countries. The route matches the strategy that the hijackers used earlier in the flight, diverting the plane at the boundary between Malaysian and Vietnamese control, then skirting the border of Thailand and Malaysia.

Steve Pearson, an avionics and mission systems engineer at the Royal Air Force Warfare Center, told me that traveling along the boundaries between two air-control zones, called FIRs, can be a way to avoid drawing attention. Back when he was an RAF navigator, he would take advantage of this dynamic to slip through airspace where he wasn’t supposed to be: “When we used to go to other parts of the world, you could fly down FIR boundaries, and each side thought you were in the other one’s control. You could fly right down the boundary and no one would talk to you. It’s something we didn’t do very often, I must admit, but it’s something you can do.”