How Satellite Company Inmarsat Tracked Down MH370

mdsolar (1045926) writes "Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has announced that, based on satellite data analysis from UK company Inmarsat, Malayian Airlines flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, and no one on board survived. 'Effectually we looked at the doppler effect, which is the change in frequency, due to the movement of a satellite in its orbit. What that then gave us was a predicted path for the northerly route and a predicted path the southerly route,' explained Chris McLaughlin, senior vice president of external affairs at Inmarsat. 'What we discovered was a correlation with the southerly route and not with the northern route after the final turn that the aircraft made, so we could be as close to certain as anybody could be in that situation that it went south. Where we then went was to work out where the last ping was, knowing that the aircraft still had some fuel, but that it would have run out before the next automated ping. We don't know what speed the aircraft was flying at, but we assumed about 450 knots.' Inmarsat passed the relevant analysis to the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) yesterday. The cause of the crash remains a mystery."

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

As a supervillian I prefer locations such as this, such as my base deep on the ocean floor. Hopefully they don't find it when they look for the damn plane.

Re:Flight recorder

[Lumpy]

They already know about your Skull Volcano island... they dont care because the US government hopes to contract out your services for the "protection" of the American People...

BTW: you have those genetically altered badgers ready yet?

Re:Flight recorder

[dj245]

Still vastly better than what it was only a day ago, and there seems to be a lot more possible debris sightings in the search area which I take as a sign they might be in the right area and will hopefully pin it down some more. The race now is to find it before the black box transmitters go silent, a task for which the US is dispatching some specialist search gear apparently, because that's probably the only hope of giving the bereaved a chance at some closure left now.

Forget the bereaved, how on earth will the media ever get closure if the plane isn't found?

Re:Flight recorder

[dgatwood]

The ones with the skunk glands?

Badgers? We don't need no steeeking badgers.

Re:Flight recorder

[TheCarp]

> I fail to see what they did wrong, even in hindsight.

That is because you are not applying the right standard. You see, anytime any effort fails, they, by definition did the wrong thing. Let me explain. Lets say, you have Ace Queen and the flop comes out Ace Ace King, then the a queen and a duece drop.

Now you have a full house, so if you bet and win, you did the right thing, However, if someone else had the king, and wins, you did the wrong thing, because you lost. Even though you had the same information available either way, and the negative outcome was extremely unlikely, by applying this standard retroactively, you made the wrong choice.

I know this may not make much sense, but that is because you are clearly stuck in antiqueted pre-9/11 world thinking where we could take the chance of allowing nuanced arguments that require deeper understanding than could be intuitively understood by a 4 year old.

Re:Flight recorder

[Minwee]

And if you're really serious, you can drop enough so that a man could walk from Greenland to Iceland to Scotland without getting his feet wet.