Lonewolf_50 wrote:
Seems like an extraneous requirement to me. They were called upon to look into, not implement. Perhaps, looking into it shone a little light on a few issues and unintended outcomes of such a system.
Think through what that means in practical terms, on a flight deck, when the distinction between a malfunction and an emergency isn't always as clear as hindsight indicates, or for cases when a malfunction becomes and emergency and the Flight Deck Crew have no idea such a change of condition has occurred? Such a trigger would be more likely to generate false positives than do much of any good.
I agree up to the point that under certain conditions, such as during imminent danger at remote locations (outside VHF radio / radar range or total comms failure), as a last item prior to an emergency landing on land or ditching in the ocean, why not add "ELT . . . ON" to the QRH / Emergency check list?
However unlikely, it does happen. An example of total comms failure but without any other failure modes and within radar range, enabling the use of the transponder:
Air France B772 near Zurich on Apr 15th 2013, loss comm | AeroInside
Obviously, in this situation the ELT activation would not be necessary.