Verbalizing What Needs To Be Said

Yeah, what are the angles of these other pings?:

So here's the question: What else can we determine from those extra handshakes? If one data point can indicate MH370's distance and angle relative to the satellite, couldn't a string of them — which we apparently have — help plot the aircraft's trajectory? Why aren't we looking more closely at the other data? Why is the last one so important?

We can plausibly guess that this idea has already occurred to someone. Inmarsat says it's shared its information with Malaysian Airlines. But it's not clear why officials haven't said more about this line of reasoning.

And speculation in reader's comments too:

In the past several days, I see people draw this line from the point of disappearance straight toward Penang, west southwest, and then just stop, as if that is where the plane disappeared, meaning it could have turned north or south after that, we just don't know. But we do know where it went from that point. It actually turned at Penang and continued northwest for over a hundred miles before disappearing off the limits of that radar. The plane was taking a route, it was obviously heading somewhere. There is no indication at all that it later turned south. The actual data and route it was traveling shows north on a corridor toward the Middle East.

The only reason people have put the southern corridor into their heads is because they don't know how the plane could've gotten through the radars of those countries up north. This objection seems strong until you think for half a second and realize that it had just gotten over Malaysian radar without incident that very night, overlying the entire peninsula and even a major city at lower-than-normal altitude. And this was picked up on radar but not noticed - it took them seven days to put together that this was the missing flight. The Indian Navy later admitted that their radar system is used on an "as needed basis", and is often off at night. If India and Malaysia's radar system is so pathetic you can bet Bangladesh and Myanmar's are worse. So the northern radar objection just doesn't hold, and again, that is the way the plane was actually going, and there is no reason other than the radar objection to speculate at all that the plane later turned south.