Dear Kbryan:
Please consider what Mr Learmount has already put forth.
“The cost-benefit analysis doesn’t work out because aviation doesn’t kill enough people any longer to make it worth installing.”
Airlines have already figured out what info they want to track and collect for inflight monitoring. See the ACARS suites and, for example, the RR monitoring programs. The suggestion being made is to transmit, collect, and track a mountain of data that they are not going to use.
What's the point of doing that? There isn't one.
Any replacement for the "black box" needs to do all that a black box now does, and then add a value not currently present.
What, pray tell, do you think that is?
There is already ample means to keep track of an aircraft, when one considers that the design criteria for aircraft is that people fly them with the intention of flying them safely, of getting to their destination, and being reliable to the nth degree.
When you take a novel/one-off event like MAL and try to apply its circumstances to day in and day out airline and flying operations, you get a bad fit.
1. If the cascading series of malfunctions line is correct, tracking the aricraft isn't the problem, figuring out those systems and the "graceful degradation" design challenge is the problem to solve.
2. If you follow the human angency line of thinking, you run into the contradiction of WHY airliners are designed in the first place -- to get somewhere and not get lost -- and why the entire flight tracking regime already existant is there -- to help the aircraft get where it is going. These are both designed and operated under the assumption that aircraft are used for their intended purpose. 99.99999999%+ of the time, aircraft are.
I find this entire line of inquiry without value. Furthermore, all that exotic tracking capability being bandied about would not have saved the souls on the aircraft. All it would do is help find the crash site sooner. It took a few years to find AF 447, and oddly enough, while that search was going on, the world kept turning and planes kept flying.
Making policy based on histrionics and novel statistical outliers results in poor policy.