Missing plane crashed in the southern corridor

London: The Doppler effect of hourly ‘pings’ from the missing Malaysian aircraft was measured to find the direction in which the plane flew. The satellite operator Inmarsat managed to work out the flight’s last position in remote waters off Australia’s west coast.

Malaysia’s prime minister announced on Monday that the Inmarsat analysis of flight MH370’s could only mean it ran 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. 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. So the British satellite operator measured the amount of time it took for the pings to be returned.
 
“We looked at the Doppler effect, which is the change in frequency due to the movement of a satellite in its orbit,” said Chris McLaughlin, Inmarsat’s senior vice president of external affairs.
“We applied the autopilot speeds – about 350 knots. We applied what we knew about the fuel and range of the aircraft to hit the series of ping information we had”.
 
The figures were them compared to data from other Malaysia Airlines planes and similar flight routes, which definitively showed the plane could only have been going down the southern corridor, and would eventually have run out of fuel.
 
Media reports said as far as could be worked out, the plane was flying at a cruising height, above 30,000 feet (9,100 metres). They found no evidence of fluctuating heights.

McLaughlin has called for all commercial aircraft to be fitted with existing technology that would mean a plane cannot go missing.

 

(With AFP inputs)