Data

Some of the most revealing maps to emerge regarding the flight path taken by MH370 are the following maps released bt the Malaysion Ministry of Transport here.

The maps are screen shots of a Google Earth software with various possible paths and critical points that control the segmens of the paths. Clearly whoever produced the map has the critical points as Google Earth markers with precise coordinates, but this data has never been released.

Unfortunately Google Earth uses a projection that cannot easily be determined by looking at the screenshots, but it is possible to rectify the images using a 3rd order polynomilal transform which is similas thg rubber sheet the images back to a sensible projection and digitise the images to extract the data with a reasonable degree of accuracy. I used about a dozen control points on each map to perform the rubber sheet operation. Points were selected from distinctive features on shorelines and topographic features on the sea floor topography.Coordinates for the features were obtained from GIS shoreline data sets and Google Earth sea floor topographyr. After the rubber sheeting operation, the shoreline data was superimposed over the rectified image to test the fit and a fit within a few km was obtained in most areas cases