Originally Posted by FLEXPWR
Many air carrier are installing WiFi for passengers, this sure costs more than an extra battery for a pinger?
Ah, but wifi makes more money. Few passengers will pay extra to travel with a carrier because they've got a better pinger than everyone else.
With that said, an upgrade to the pinger can't really be done alone. In MH370's case, we got almost ridiculously lucky that (a) Inmarsat was still getting data even though the plane wasn't signed up for that, and (b) someone at Inmarsat realised that they could use the tiny amount of available data to locate the plane. If not for that, we'd still be searching north of Vietnam, and no pinger upgrade is going to help there. Some device to say where the plane went down - be it an ejectable GPS beacon or something else - is really necessary to get search vessels into an area where the pinger might be useful.