You are absolutely correct, I took flying lessons 35 years or so ago and after doing my solo I went no further (too expensive at the time). As I explained to Rob, this stuff makes very little sense to anyone who is not familiar with statistical techniques. You are absolutely correct also that I look at the forest (the complete data set) not the trees (the individual data points).
Really all that I did was break down the velocity data into its x (east – west) and y (north – south) components. You are also correct that I did not analyze the z component (vertical) for that study since it was not being examined.
The first question is, was the plane changing velocity in the x component during the time frame examined. The answer is yes. The second question, was there a change in longitude per time changing as well (recall from your college calculus that longitude/time is the same as velocity except you are using degrees instead of miles, or nautical miles in this case, and the first derivative or slope, is the rate of change in that value). The answer is that the degrees/second fit a linear regression line nearly perfectly meaning that the slope for those data points was relatively constant. In other words, there was not any significant change in the degree/second rate, or simply put, no.
Since it is known that the x component in velocity is changing, it does not make sense that the longitude rate of change is not. When you look at the y data, there is a corresponding change associated with BOTH. In other words, just another way of looking at the same data but in different units. The same phenomena is observed in the translated fdr file except the residual error of the regression fit has been corrected (the latitude/longitude offset in the csv file).
My goal was to understand for myself which data in those files makes sense in the “real world” and which has been tampered with.
When you have three representations of the “same” data set, and all three are different, then I don’t think that any reasonable person can claim that they have not been tampered with. At this point, the only data that seems to behave as “real world” data is the physics data such as acceleration. So that is what I will use for my purposes.
I understand your frustration, and that is my lacking in being able to explain it in simpler terms. But try to think of it this way.
Velocity is simply distance/time measured in miles per hour (or other unit). All I did was substitute degrees for miles and see if both changed in harmony (acceleration). They did not. Image my frustration trying to understand some of the aviation stuff you guys are talking about
