Charlotte MacDonald
speaker
1,889 appearances
62 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Apr 2025
Charlotte MacDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
To give you an idea of how, I'm going to tell you a story about another missing plane.
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This was June 2009.
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Five days after the plane went missing, debris from the aircraft was found floating on the surface of the Atlantic.
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But the anguished relatives of those on the plane still didn't know what happened to their loved ones.
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And the mystery of why the plane crashed could only be answered by finding the black box and the cockpit voice recorder.
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You may think that having found the debris, it would be easy to find the rest of the plane.
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But it's not that simple.
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The area near the equator is known for unpredictable currents.
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There was no way of working out where that debris had been five days earlier.
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Ships, planes and submarines searched for the airliner, but they couldn't find it.
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At this point, the French authority responsible for investigating aviation accidents, the BEA, made a call to a group of statisticians in the US.
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Keller went out to France to help the search.
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With her colleagues, they went through all the available information and assessed the uncertainties of each piece of data, applying Bayesian principles of probability to work out the most likely location of the plane.
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To calculate these figures, they first looked at the theories about what caused the plane to crash.
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For instance, they assessed the likeliness of various mechanical failures and came up with a probability for each scenario.
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They then assessed historical data from previous crashes, noting, for example, that planes were usually found very close to where they were last known to have been.
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They took the last known location of the plane and estimated it could not have flown more than 40 nautical miles in any direction from that point.
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Using Bayesian maths, Keller and her team created what they call a probability map of the search area.
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Finally, they looked at all the data from searches that had already been carried out, and they lowered the probability of the plane being found in those locations, because they'd already been searched.
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The Metron analysts gave a map to a search team, indicating the area they thought the plane was most likely to be in.
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Showing 681–700 of 1,889 · page 35 of 95
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