Closing the Search Box [S2Ep21 audio]

The ocean is a big place. So maybe it isn’t that surprising that MH370 wasn’t found.

At least, that’s what you hear a lot of people say.

It’s pretty widely accepted among the general public that the seabed search failed because, well, the ocean is big, why wouldn’t it be hard to find a plane in it?

But actually, the scientists who defined the search area had good reason to think that they knew where the plane had flown to, with a pretty good degree of accuracy. In today’s episode, we discuss how Australian scientists wrestled with the Inmarsat data, trying and discarding several approaches before settling on a method that allowed them to state, with mathematical certainty, where the seabed search would find the plane.

That search, of course, failed. But math is math — if the calculations failed to yield the correct location of the plane, there must be a reason why. A branch of statistics called Bayesian inference offers guidance on what to do next.