If I may throw more wood onto the fire. A company I used to work for had all of its aircraft outfitted with sat-phones. Same thing as mentioned before, 5 parameters sent every 5 seconds. The speed ranges we were dealing with were all south of 270 knots, so finding a downed aircraft would have been relatively easy.
Except that the problem we had was we were operating in some pretty remote areas. We often found that the system would become masked by mountains or that we were out of range of the satellite. We used to have a notation in our company ops manual that, were an aircraft to "drop off" the screen while in flight, we were to begin a communications search with immediate effect. This ended up taking so much time from our dispatchers that the notation was removed.
We have to remember that satellite tracking is not done by the same satellites that are used for a GNSS - well, at least GPS. The company doing the tracking must have at least one satellite in the sky. Unless they have more than the GNSS constellation being used, they can never ensure complete, world-wide coverage. So we as an industry end up paying for a service that, in my experience, works less than 50% of the time.
So our option is to go to the public, tell them we need a whole new constellation of satellites to ensure world-wide coverage (explaining all the way why the current system does not do this and cannot be upgraded to do this), we need to outfit the world fleet with trackers, and we need to reduce the cost to user to make it more affordable than the $50/flight-minute quoted before.
Once we put the price tag on all this, explaining we can do it through a dollar amount per ticket, I'm sure you will see the desire drop off substantially. I mean, if they're not willing to pay an extra couple dollars to keep experience at the pointy end, what makes you think they'll pay for technology that will only help them if they're dead?
Last edited by +TSRA; 26th Jul 2014 at 18:13.
Reason: Missing "0" in a quoted number.