New | How satellite ‘pings’ revealed missing Malaysia flight MH370’s final path
First time technique has been used by Inmarsat to locate plane
The satellite operator Inmarsat revealed how it managed to work out which direction the missing Malaysia Airlines plane flew in by measuring the Doppler effect of hourly ‘pings’ from the aircraft.
Malaysia’s prime minister announced earlier that the Inmarsat analysis of flight MH370’s path placed its last position in remote waters off Australia’s west coast, meaning it can only have run out of fuel above the southern Indian Ocean.
Inmarsat explained how they plotted models of the flight’s route by measuring the Doppler effect of satellite pings, giving corridors arcing north and south along which the plane could have flown for at least five hours.
Despite the plane’s communication systems being switched off, satellite pings were still bouncing back from the aircraft, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The pings are sent from a ground station to a satellite, then onto the plane, which automatically sends a ping back to the satellite and down to the ground station.
They do not include global positioning system (GPS) data, time or distance information.