As a part of target motion analysis(TMA) with highly noisy bearings-only measurements from a passive sonar system, a nonlinear batch estimator is proposed to provide the initial estimates to a sequential estimator called the modified gain extended Kalman filter(MGEKF). Based on the system observability analysis of passive target tracking, a practical and effective method is suggested to determine the observer maneuvers for improved TMA performance through system observability enhancing. Also suggested is a method to determine observer location for enhanced system observability at the initial phase of TMA from various engagement boundaries which represent the relationship between observer-target relative geometrical data and system observability. The proposed TMA methods are tested by a series of computer simulation runs.