Inmarsat’s use of data helps solve MH370 flight path riddle
By Mark Odell in London and Demetri Sevastopulo in Hong Kong
UK-based company Inmarsat solved the mystery of the final course taken by flight MH370 – the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet that disappeared without trace two weeks ago – by a revolutionary use of satellite data.
The analysis by the UK-based company, a London-based operator of communications satellites, and UK air accident investigators, proved conclusively that the last signal from the aircraft came from a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean.
Najib Razak, Malaysia’s prime minister, said on the basis of this information investigators had concluded that flight MH370 which set off from Kuala Lumpur bound northeast for Beijing ended up crashing into the sea 2,500km south west of Perth.
“This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean,” Mr Najib said.
The news comes 16 days after the Boeing 777 passenger jet vanished in the early hours of March 8 less than an hour after taking off on a routine red-eye flight to China. Since then more than two dozen countries have been helping Malaysia look for the jet, in the most intensive search for a missing aircraft in history.
The focus of the search turned last week to the Indian Ocean based on an analysis of “pings” received by one of Inmarsat’s satellites from an automatic system onboard the aircraft.
That data established the aircraft had veered west from its original flight path, passed over the Malaysia peninsula and then flown along one of two arcs – a northern corridor that stretches to Kazakhstan and a southern corridor that runs into the Indian Ocean past Australia.
But over the weekend, Inmarsat’s engineers fine-tuned the data drawing on a new type of analysis which had never been used for this purpose before, to establish the flight went south rather than north.
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The team used the “Doppler effect” of the satellite as it moved in its orbit to establish a set of measurements for the predicted northerly and southerly paths, a company spokesman said. The Doppler effect describes the change in the frequency of sound, radio or light waves as they travel between two objects, when one or both of them are moving.
The team then overlaid these measurement with data from other aircraft that had flown both “arcs” and the results corresponded with the southerly route. Inmarsat had the results peer-reviewed before passing them on to the Malaysian authorities.
Before the announcement by Mr Najib, Australian and Chinese aircraft reported on Monday they had spotted several objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean. However, none of the items has yet been recovered. Tony Abbott, the Australian prime minister, cautioned they might be unconnected to the aircraft.
In Beijing, family members of some of the 153 Chinese nationals who were on the flight cried and shouted when they heard the announcement. At least one person was carried out on a stretcher after hearing the news.
Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian defence minister who has become the global face of the search, sought to reassure the relatives, tweeting after Mr Najib’s announcement: “#MH370: words just cannot describe how I feel 2nite but I promise you esp d families of all d passengers n crew: The search continues.”
He also tweeted: “I truly understand there are no words which could console the family members of #MH370. The whole world is with you in these difficult times.”
Earlier, Malaysia Airlines said it had sent the following text message to relatives of those on board: “Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived. As you will hear in the next hour from Malaysia’s prime minister, we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean.”
The search teams will now seek to establish exactly where the aircraft crashed in the vast southern expanses of the Indian Ocean. Any clue as to what happened on MH370 will be contained in the voice cockpit and flight data recorders, which are assumed now to be lying at depths of up to 4,000m on the seabed. They are both fitted with transponders that have a battery life of just 30 days under water.
Additional reporting by Tom Mitchell and Julie Zhu in Hong Kong
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