As pointed out within the posts of 4th July (In particular Rob21, post #2964) there should have been an 'automatic' mayday response to the circumstances on the AF447 situation. An automatic response should have happened because of the number of ACARS maintenance messages received within a few minutes, describing multiple system 'failures', ending with a message that could indicate a rapid descent; the AF maintenance centre could have instigated the SAR process within minutes, rather than others taking hours to realise that there was a problem! Introducing a 'panic' button will not help if there is no-one listening. But (as you hint) the monitoring and data gathering approach would certainly seem to need a serious upgrade. A possible starting point could be to replace the on-board FDR and CVR systems with real time data transmissions. If ACARS cannot cope/is too expensive to handle the volume of data or cannot deliver the required dependability, the Iridium system (
Iridium) would seem to be an alternative. If such a data collection service were to be made available, automatic monitoring would be possible. For example, if an aircraft went off course or had an unscheduled change in Flight Level a low level alert could be generated; loss of a sequence of transmissions could generate a higher level alert. Replacing the FDR and CVR with a global data transmission capability should be a cost saving; as they are built to such a high spec, I'm sure that FDR do not come cheap. There should be a weight saving as well.
However, I believe such a change (plus other improvements in data gathering and analysis) is highly desirable purely from an aircraft safety perspective. It should be 'unacceptable' that aircraft may still be flying with possibly the same vulnerabilities that has already resulted in loss of aircraft, just because of the lack of adequate diagnostic data. We have the situation now that it might take a year (or never) to find the FDR; we are all living in hope that another aircraft is not lost to the same problem (or more likely combination of problems). The problem(s) could apply or not to Boeing and/or Airbus, to Goodrich and/or Thales, could be related to freak weather conditions or inadequate pilot training or something else. We just do not know, but we could, and should.