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It won't save lives and wouldn't have saved lives. It's only to improve the efficiency of recovery operations.

It could save future lives to know what happened, though.

There are several redundant tracking systems on an airliner, but the pilot deliberately turned them off. That hadn't been an issue before.

GPS is a one-way system though, using sattelite signals to triangulate your own position; there's no uplink / reverse contact required, and it's up to the GPS receiver to then send the location on through a ground station.