Vessels in the Fu Yuan Yu fleet previously seen near the MH370 search site suddenly disappeared from our monitoring system last week as the entire fleet and associated fishing gear stopped broadcasting AIS. One of the vessels has now reappeared, the Fu Yuan Yu 076 is giving a current location in the Bay of Bengal near India. However looking at the vessel’s track over the past three months there is good reason to be skeptical. While the vessel showed a likely fishing track they appeared in a very unlikely location, the mountains of Tibet.

What we see is in fact a latitude reversal where a vessel’s position in the Southern Hemisphere is flipped over the Equator to appear in the Northern Hemisphere. This is one of a number of patterns of false AIS locations we have documented. We’re not sure if these simply result from errors in transmission or if the vessel operator intends to make his vessel difficult to track. Fortunately we have developed some tools to pick these false locations out of our data and correct them. The reappearance today of what is likely a beacon attached to the vessel’s fishing gear (identifying as Fu Yuan Yu 076 08) with a mirror track in the Southern Hemisphere is very strong evidence that this is also the true location of the parent fishing vessel.

The vessel’s latest positions show them moving on an irregular course at slow speed so it’s possible that they have resumed fishing at this new location. Though we can’t see any of the other vessels in the Fu Yuan Yu fleet there is a good chance they are nearby. We’ll see if any of them reappear in the next few days.

Here are seen two AIS tracks over the past 3 months. The fishing vessel Fu Yuan Yu 076 broadcasting an impossible location on land in the Northern Hemisphere and the associated Fu Yuan Yu 076 08 (likely fishing gear) mirroring the track but in the Southern Hemisphere. The track of the Fu Yuan Yu 076 08 confirms our suspicion that the true location of the parent vessel can be found by reversing the latitude of their broadcast positions. While none of the other vessels in the fleet can be located it may be that the group has moved north to this new location.