I keep thinking they need to put a black box on the top of these planes that auto ejects at the first sign of crashing and can float etc.
It is, however, an option such a tracking device should try to stay on top of. Hence, it would be best if the crew could not disable it.
The problem with that design decision made, of course, is that it would be a shame if a plane fell from the sky because of a failed tracking device which the crew couldn't disable (typically fire because of an electrical issue).
However, there are intrinsically safe radio transmitters available for use in explosion-hazard environments, where fire obviously is a big no-no.
Problem? It would need its own, dedicated power supply; probably a battery (which comes with its own set of challenges!) charged via solar panels and aircraft power.
Making systems tamperproof and failsafe is hard. Should be doable, though, leaving the question of who is to foot the bill; chances are that will be a bigger problem to solve than the engineering side of it.
Also, I am pretty confident the crew can pull the fuse on the flight recorders if need arise.
I understand the vastness of the ocean but it just seems there has to be a way to at least get them quicker and closer to the original crash site, but I am ignorant of the technical side of such a thing as far as ranges etc.
The whole problem becomes a lot easier to handle if the boxes were more or less guaranteed to detach from the body and remain afloat; then they could ping a satellite and we'd know just where to look. That requires orders of magnitude less energy than transmitting an acoustic signal underwater.
(Such devices can be very small; the PLB I carry whenever I work offshore is the size of a slightly clunky cellphone and yet will let rescue services know my position to a few dozen yards minutes after I fell overboard - as long as I try to not do my man overboard-act too close to the poles, where coverage is spotty-ish.
Affix half a dozen of these loosely to an aircraft, be prepared to handle a ton of false alarms - and we'd know where planes come down at sea more or less instantly.
Matter of fact, it'd be so quick the first sign of trouble an airline was likely to get would be rescue services calling to ask whether they are SURE their flight such-and-such didn't crash at, say, 61 degrees 32'11.4752"N, 14 degrees 11'37.8531"W 47 seconds ago?
See this for possible alternatives: https://www.bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/flight.data....
That would probably be a bit too much for existing satellite communication systems; while most flights wouldn't need to transmit such a signal most of the time (If a plane went missing over, say, the Midwest, we'd find it!), frequent transmissions from every flight over sea, for instance would probably overload today's networks - meaning you'd need to launch new satellites to provide this service, meaning it would be outrageously expensive, meaning it wouldn't happen.
However, if we relax the requirement to, say, once every five minutes or so, at least you'll have a much better idea of where something went down than 'Probably somewhere in the southern hemisphere.'
Would a GPS coordinate every minute really be such a strain on the systems?
That would mean about 1.5 megabytes per minute, globally. I think the global satellite network is easily up to the task.
Multiple short transmissions are more taxing than a few long ones.
What I am interested, is feasibility this: nowadays you can buy sailor lifejackets with personal EPIRB which pings the satellite with your location. I am sure that is a lot of waste weight, but then, Lufthansa is still serving food with steel utensil, so maybe its not as bad.
Also, randomly searching info about black boxes, I've found they have option for 90 day pinger batteries. Perhaps that could've aided MH370 search.