malaysian families as well, and malaysian airlines own family, its 12 crew and pilots on board that plane lost as well. their family s suffering, too, at this hour. we re waiting to hear a press briefing coming up here in just a couple of minutes, we think, that should shed some more light, perhaps, on that decision to make the announcement, perhaps give us more details. we don t know yet specifically if it was able to pinpoint where they should be looking for this aircraft. that is going to be extremely important, deborah, even to narrow down that vast search area. very important. back to you. absolutely. and with winter setting in, obviously, it s just going to be so difficult with the drifts moving that debris. so promising and yet so far. jim clancy for us. thanks so much. and those 5:30 a.m. eastern time press briefings have become routine in the last couple of weeks. when that happens, again, we will bring that to you. we will monitor it and bring it to you if events warrant
was have some tangible evidence of the plane found off the waters of perth and bring that to the families together with this new data, that they were afraid that the media was going to break it first. we heard not only from the prime minister a little bit today, but we also heard from the ceo of malaysia airlines, who talked about the tragedy in his view. we all feel enormous sorrow and pain. sorrow that all those who boarded flight mh-370 on saturday, eighth of march, will not see their families again. and those families will now have to live they have to live on without their loved ones. reporter: remember, the chinese made up the majority of those who were on board that aircraft, but there was a lot of
this is called the doppler effect. the inmarsat technique analyzes the difference between frequency at tha a ground station expects to receive and what is actually measured. this difference is the result of the doppler effect and is known as diverse frequency offset. diverse frequency offset changes depending on the location of the aircraft on an arc of possible positions. its direction of travel and its speed. in order to establish confidence in this theory, inmarsat checked its predictions using information obtained from six other b-777 aircraft flying on the same day in various directions. there was good agreement. while on the ground at kuala lumpur airport and during the early stage of the flight, mh-370 transmitted several messages.
was analyzed by us, by uk aivb. this is technical in nature, so although i will give you as much information as i can, i am not in a position to answer questions about the data analysis today. we will be providing this information as a press release at the end of this press conference, and this is the info provide to us by aeib. we will take written questions which will be answered as soon as possible. in recent days, inmarsat created a innovative technique which considers the size of the aircraft relative to the side of the satellite. depending on this relative movement, the frequency received and transmitted will differ from its normal value. in much the same way that the sound of a passing car changes as it approaches and passes by.
at this stage, the location of the aircraft and the satellite were known, so it was possible to contemplate symptom characteristics for the aircraft satellite and the ground station. during the flight, the ground station logged the transmitter and received powers frequency at each handshake. knowing the system characteristics and position of the satellite, it was possible considering aircraft performance to determine where on each arc the calculated burst frequency offset fits best. the analysis showed poor correlation with the northern corridor but good correlation with the southern corridor. and depending on the ground speed of the aircraft, it was then possible to estimate the position at 0011 utc, at which the last complete handshake took place. i must emphasize that this is not the final position of the