[LINK] Flash drives in the sea?

[Jim Birch]

Plane crashes are rare. Large commercial aircraft crashes, much rarer.
 Crashes into the deep ocean where wreckage location is difficult,
extremely rare.  A large commercial aircraft crash in the deep ocean
without any position report after an apparent 9 hour ghost flight in an
unknown direction had not occurred before MH370.  A quick web search
produces figures like 30 million scheduled airline flights per year from
9,000 airports with between 8,000 and 13,000 planes in the air at any time.
 Very, very few go missing in any way.  The MH370 flight is historically
(like) one in a billion.

The cause of the event is currently unknown but it neither automated
position reporting or changes to the black box design would have prevented
the destruction of the aircraft and loss of life.  A position reporting
system that continued to work through the as yet unknown event would have
considerably simplified the search for the wreckage.  (Recovery of the
flight recorders alone is not enough; if there is a physical failure or
adverse event, the wreckage is vital for diagnosis.)  Recovery may or may
not result in modifications to aircraft systems to prevent or reduce the
likelihood of recurrence. It does eliminate the popular angst of not
knowing what happened.

Retrofitting (say) 10k planes of varying make and model with automatic
location reporting or a modified black box would be an enormous cost in
design, fabrication, installation, and downtime, not to mention management
and maintenance.    The "black box" flight recorders are mature designs
with proven reliability that you wouldn't mess with casually.

It seems unlikely that any retrofit to would be justified in terms of
opportunity costs for improving flight safety.  However, given the emotion
attached to flight safety and the "only once" tenet for aircraft accidents,
we can expect a measured response in after a diagnosis.

Jim