How Statisticians Found Air France Flight 447 Two Years After It Crashed Into Atlantic
Their approach was to use a technique known as Bayesian inference which takes into account all the prior information known about the crash location as well as the evidence from the unsuccessful search efforts. The result is a probability distribution for the location of the wreckage.
Bayesian inference is a statistical technique that mathematicians use to determine some underlying probability distribution based on an observed distribution. In particular, statisticians use this technique to update the probability of a particular hypothesis as they gather additional evidence.
In the case of Air France Flight 447, the underlying distribution was the probability of finding the wreckage at a given location. That depended on a number of factors such as the last GPS location transmitted by the plane, how far the aircraft might have traveled after that and also the location of dead bodies found on the surface once their rate of drift in the water had been taken into account.