Malaysia's prime minister announced earlier that the Inmarsat analysis of flight MH370's path placed its last position in remote waters off Australia's west coast, meaning it can only have run 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, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
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," Chris McLaughlin, Inmarsat's senior vice president of external affairs, told Britain's Sky News television.
"What that then gave us was a predicted path for the northerly route and a predicted path the southerly route,” McLaughlin said.
"We don't know whether the plane stayed at a constant speed; we don't know whether its headings changed subsequently," he said.
Therefore, "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,” he said.
By Ruchi Singh
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com