19th-century physics used to trace missing plane

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Photo taken on March 24, 2014 shows the building of British satellite company Inmarsat in London, Britain. The British Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) on Monday confirmed it had worked with Inmarsat to provide information that helped Malaysian authorities confirm that missing Malaysian Airways flight MH370 had ended in the southern Indian Ocean.[Photo/Xinhua]

LONDON - Britain's Inmarsat used a wave phenomenon discovered in the 19th century to analyse the seven pings its satellite picked up from Malaysia Airlines 370 to determine its final destination.

The new findings led Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak to conclude on Monday that the Boeing 777, which disappeared more than two weeks ago, crashed thousands of miles away in the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 239 people on board.

The pings, automatically transmitted every hour from the aircraft after the rest of its communications systems had stopped, indicated it continued flying for hours after it disappeared from its flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

From the time the signals took to reach the satellite and the angle of elevation, Inmarsat was able to provide two arcs, one north and one south that the aircraft could have taken.

Inmarsat's scientists then interrogated the faint pings using a technique based on the Doppler effect, which describes how a wave changes frequency relative to the movement of an observer, in this case the satellite, a spokesman said.

The Doppler effect is why the sound of a police car siren changes as it approaches and then overtakes an observer.

Chris McLaughlin, senior vice president of external affairs at Inmarsat, poses for a photo in an office in London on March 25, 2014. [Photo by Cecily Liu/China Daily]

Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch was also involved in the analysis.

"We then took the data we had from the aircraft and plotted it against the two tracks, and it came out as following the southern track," Jonathan Sinnatt, head of corporate communications at Inmarsat, said.

The company then compared its theoretical flight path with data received from Boeing 777s it knew had flown the same route, he said, and it matched exactly.

The findings were passed to another satellite company to check, he said, before being released to investigators on Monday.

The paucity of data - only faint pings received by a single satellite every hour or so - meant techniques like triangulation using a number of satellites or GPS (Global Positioning System) could not be used to determine the aircraft's flight path.

KEEPING TRACK

Stephen Wood, CEO of All Source Analysis, a satellite analytic firm, said it seemed that the investigators had narrowed down the area substantially. "But it's still a big area that they have to search," he said.

The incident is likely to spur a review of aviation rules, especially related to communications equipment and the ability to turn off a plane's transponder, he added.

But it is too early to say what that would entail because it remains unknown what made the plane divert from its original course.

"This type of incident will cause everyone who flies airplanes commercially with passengers to be really pressed for a whole new line of ways to keep track of their precious cargo," said Wood, a former US intelligence officer who headed the analysis unit of DigitalGlobe Inc, a satellite imagery firm, until July 2013.

DigitalGlobe last week provided images that Malaysia's government called a "credible lead" for the massive trans-national effort to locate the plane.

	Video: How can an airplane disappear? MH370 is not the first aircraft that has disappeared without a trace.
	Video: Officials remain puzzled Tension mounted as the search for the missing Malaysian airplane continued.

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