How Math Solved the Mystery of the Missing Malaysian Jet's Path
By Alan Boyle, NBC News
Analysts at the Inmarsat satellite venture executed a computational tour de force to determine where a missing Malaysia Airlines jet probably went, but mathematician John Zweck says the feat is simple enough to explain with a basketball, a hoop ... and an ant.
"The math involved is really just a little bit more than the trigonometry you'd have in high school," Zweck, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, told NBC News.
Zweck retraced the steps that the investigators at Inmarsat, Britain's Air Accidents Investigations Branch and the Boeing Co. took to narrow down the search area for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 jet, which disappeared from radar screens on March 8.
All the investigators had to go on were signals from a transmitter on the Boeing 777 jet that sent hourly pings to an Inmarsat telecom satellite, hovering high over the Indian Ocean. They were able to glean two key sets of clues from those signals: the angular distance of the jet when each of the pings was sent, and the frequency of each ping.
The angular distance allowed Inmarsat to draw a series of arcs, to the north and to the south, indicating the range of possible locations when each ping was sent. "We know the times at which the airplane crossed those arcs," Zweck said. But the arcs stretch so far it'd be impossible to search the entire swath of ocean.
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