

Satellite Ping modelling confirms MH370 headed south (& crashed) - porker
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26720772
Just how could they do that?
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porker
OK, I get that they developed a new algorithm for this field, but can anyone
shed light on how you could use satellite pings for this aircraft and other
flights to work out it headed south?

~~~
kbenson
I imagine it was probably a mix of using timestamps, assumed atmospheric
conditions, signal quality, and any other data they can model and what
variations it can/might cause in the signal from all the combined to make
assumptions about possible locations when the ping was sent. Using data from
other planes is probably using their ping data along with their more accurate
reported flight data to to generate a statistical model of what conditions
cause what variations in specific conditions.

That probably sounds very "hand-wavey" and unlikely, but consider that a lot
of advanced internet security attacks rely on building predictive models of
slightly broken random number generator implementations (from my
understanding).

For another example, here's[1] something that a quick google search brought up
that was possible almost nine years ago.

[1]:
[http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/09/14_key.s...](http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/09/14_key.shtml)

