Search for Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Drastically Narrows

[muriel_volestrangler]

50. Those figures do show it would have been below his horizon

If there had been any refraction to enable him to see over the horizon, it wouldn't raise the image up that much - certainly not enough for him to see it as 'high up'. If you don't think 13 degrees is particularly 'high up' (like looking up a 22% grade slope), then something that is so low that, without refraction, it would be beyond the horizon, definitely isn't 'high up'.

We have the coordinates for the oil rig, and the last known position on radar of the plane in the South China Sea:
From the article above: rig "Lat 08 22’ 30.20” N Lat 108 42.22.26” E" ; from the Bloomberg article: "plane 065515 North (longitude) and 1033443 East (latitude)"

Putting those into a calculator, we get a distance of 587 km between them. So it's well beyond where you see anything without refraction, and it's not reasonable to say that refraction could not only bring the plane back up above the horizon, but 'high up'. And at 587km, a plane would be truly tiny. This would have had to be a very small fire for this theory to work - the plane flew for another 7 hours. The oil rig worker cannot have seen the plane.