WASHINGTON — For nearly five years, government and industry officials have been exploring ways to make it easier to find airliners and their critical "black boxes" that end up in the ocean. But their efforts are too late to help in the case of a Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared over the weekend.
The efforts were spurred primarily by the search for Air France Flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009. It was nearly two years later before the main wreckage of the Airbus A330 and its black boxes — data and cockpit voice recorders — were found about 13,000 feet under water.
"I think at the time a lot of people were looking at Air France 447 as unique," William Waldock, who teaches accident investigation at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. "We really had not had one like that where it takes so long to find it."
Since then, the International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, has issued new standards requiring signals from underwater locator beacons on black boxes on all airliners to last at least 90 days instead of the current 30. But those requirements aren't effective until 2018.
ICAO has also issued new standards effective in 2018 requiring underwater locator beacons be attached to the aircraft fuselage to help searchers find wreckage.
Another idea that has been discussed is whether airliners should also have transmitters that automatically detach and float to the surface, as U.S. Navy planes have for about 15 years, Waldock said.
"It boils down to expense as much as anything," he said. "These systems are pricey."
Some newer airliners already stream much of the same information recorded by black boxes back to their home base via satellite during flight.
But if all the thousands of airliners that are in the air in the U.S. every day did so, there wouldn't be enough bandwith to transmit the data or enough capability to record it on the ground, Waldock said.