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Comment by stevehawk | Hacker News Reader

I'm completely spitballing because what few articles I looked at didn't really answer that question. I'd wager it comes down to money. If events like MH370 are extremely rare then how much money is worth spending on it? If an event like MH370 happened tomorrow and we knew where it crashed how likely is it to change the outcome?

I'm not trolling and I don't know the answer to that last one. But I'm assuming the general consensus is that it wouldn't change anything - a plane would be down and everyone would still be dead. So instead of mandating an expensive overhaul of everything that can feed more data constantly I assume they're probably trying to make some already in place tech fill the gap and it has limits. I am entirely speculating on that though. But when in doubt, something usually comes down to a cost-benefit analysis.

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People need to "feel" safe is one answer. Dead, yeah but they'd know the reason and so on. No one wants their loved one lost without a trace.

Also the money spent is nothing in the grand scale of aviation.

"But I'm assuming the general consensus is that it wouldn't change anything - a plane would be down and everyone would still be dead"

When you know the exact crash site, you can send help more accurate and therefore faster to save people, as airplanes can sometimes make a emergency water landing...

And in general I don't quite get it. GPS exists, so does Sattelite communication. And sure, for one private person it is quite expensive, but for an Airliner??

> "airplanes can sometimes make a emergency water landing..."

But in those events the planes have transponders/beacons that will tell you where they are. Remember with MH370 the pilot disabled it and then, to the best our knowledge, pointed the plane at the water.

Considering that every android phone (literally billions of units) sends a location update every 5-10 minutes directly to Google, and nobody cares about the cost, why would airplanes transmitting continuous location updates be too costly?

Android phones stop sending location updates when they go out of cellphone reception.

A solution that can continue sending updates from any point on earth costs a lot more than one that only works in range of cellphone networks.

While true, if the airplanes already send 15 minutes updates, the infrastructure is already there. It seems logical simply increasing the ping frequency should not lead to a proportional increase in cost.

The obvious advantage is post-crash analysis to prevent it from happening in the future.

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