(CNN) -- Monday's announcement by Malaysia's Prime Minister
acknowledging that missing Flight 370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean opens
the door to a big question: How did new number crunching confirm the Boeing
777's path?
Now we know for sure "there's no way it went
north," said Inmarsat Senior Vice President Chris McLaughlin.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday that the
plane was last tracked over the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth,
Australia. Malaysian Airlines has informed passengers' relatives that "all
lives are lost," a relative told CNN.
The mathematics-based process used by Inmarsat and the UK's
Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) to reveal the definitive path was
described by McLaughlin as "groundbreaking."
What does expansion or compression mean? You may have heard
about something called the Doppler effect.
"If you sit at a train station and you listen to the
train whistle -- the pitch of the whistle changes as it moves past. That's
exactly what we have," explained CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers, who
has studied Doppler technology.
"It's the Doppler effect that they're
using on this ping or handshake back from the airplane. They know by
nanoseconds whether that signal was compressed a little -- or expanded -- by
whether the plane was moving closer or away from 64.5 degrees -- which is the
latitude of the orbiting satellite."
Each ping was analyzed for its direction of travel, Myers
said. The new calculations, McLaughlin said, underwent a peer review process
with space agency experts and contributions by Boeing.
It's possible to use this analysis to determine more
specifically the area where the plane went down, Myers said. "Using
trigonometry, engineers are capable of finding angles of flight."
No surprise
Experts said they weren't surprised by the news that the
flight traveled along the southern track -- one of two possible paths revealed
by satellite data last week. The possible northern track toward Pakistan would
have been heavily monitored by radar. Pakistan had said it found no evidence of
Flight 370 on its radar systems.
"It was very difficult to believe that no watch
captain" along the possible northern path "would've seen a burning or
distressed aircraft in the sky during the course of their watch," said
McLaughlin.
Is the more pinpointed flight path now focused enough to
increase the chances of finding wreckage from the plane?
If the flight definitely ended far from land, does that
support the theory that the plane was not hijacked? It's just one question of
many that investigators likely will be pondering in the coming days.
Hours before the Prime Minister's announcement, Australian
officials said they had spotted two objects in the southern Indian Ocean that
could be related to the flight, which has been missing since March 8.
One object is "a gray or green circular object,"
and the other is "an orange rectangular object," the Australian
Maritime Safety Authority said.
"This is obviously a major tragedy," McLaughlin
said. "The only thing you can hope is that from this, just as the Titanic
resulted in (new safety legislation), that from this, there will be a mandate
that all aircraft should be constantly tracked."
