floating FDR
Hi CJ
Good response - thanks. Can I respond to some of your specific points?
I'm not sure this would be "hideously expensive" - very little more than the cost of another FDR (though I have no idea how much an FDR costs), plus the GPS receiver/recorder - 20 bucks worth of technology. Even 'hardened', only a couple of hundred bucks. The GPS guidance units used on JDAMs might be a good place to start.
Sure, un-located, over-ocean accidents are mercifully rare. But when they do happen, a disproportionate effort is spent finding the wreckage; and much of the initial search is focussed on finding the FDR. So it's the old cost/benefit equation kicking in. I suppose the engineering challenge would be to find a way of guaranteeing that the unit broke away, and I am simply not qualified to even think about how that could be done. I guess there are people reading this who might have an idea, though.
I appreciate that debris was found on the surface, at this case and most other over-ocean events - but as we see that doesn't help locate the wreckage. My suggestion would simply give us a better chance of narrowing the search area, as it would begin to track very soon after release. And the point is that by finding the FDR early, at least investigators would have something more than inert debris to work with in the early stage of the investigation.
I like the idea of dye marker in life vests, too - very simple, very cheap.
Ditto the dual-mode pingers. I imagine they'd be easy to to incorporate with the GPS system.
And of course, you are right - KISS rules. Simple and cheap is always more likely to get implemented than complex and pricey. But despite your rigorous analysis, I still feel that what I am suggesting would not be prohibitively expensive, nor techically complex.
I must stress though that although I fly "little planes" for fun, I have no background in aeronautical engineering. But I do fly a lot - often over ocean - on business... so have some kind of vested interest, I suppose!