It seems absurd to me that every time an airplane crashes they have to go hunting for a flight recorder at the bottom of an ocean in some inaccessible part of the planet. I can sit at my desk in Lincoln, and email file attachments anywhere on the planet in a few seconds. People send email while in flight all the time. Why isnt flight data being continuously transmitted to some remote server somewhere? It just cannot be that much data to transmit.
The technology is available, the question is the price. The airline in question in the latest crash is implementing it, but it's a total fleet retrofit program, and the one that went down was still in the que to go into the shop for the overhaul.
Apparently it's not cheap to do; I've heard figures of north of a quarter million bucks a plane each. That's why it is still optional. Asia Air is doing it, but retroing an entire fleet of airliner's is way more complex than updating the apps on your cell phone. Think more along the line's of replacing every engine CPU in every taxi cab in a city with brand new one's that have full satellite communications technology........
Oh, and there's the fact that when one of these things go down, its usually at least a couple of hundred miles away from the nearest cell tower: no broad band there....
