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 _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link