WASHINGTON - s4story -- Almost 12 years after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished, and previous fruitless searches which have already cost over $160 million, a new search will begin.

But an inexpensive and readily available device, if it had been used on that airplane, could have told authorities exactly where the plane went down, so that wreckage could have long since been recovered.

Moreover, such a device could also have told us the probable cause of the crash within weeks if not days, says MIT engineer, inventor, creator of the "Banzhaf Index," and now George Washington University Professor John Banzhaf. . . .

Professor Banzhaf says that in this era of smart phones and GPS, there should be no such mysteries.

Indeed, the plane's position when it went down should have been known immediately from a simple piece of existing technology known as a floatable EPIRB, and a miniature data recorder within it recovered within days without any deep diving and endless listening for distant pings.

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When activated by triggers set off when the devices are plunged to a reasonable depth of water, these floatable EPIRB devices pop up to the surface and send out an emergency distress signal - which indicates the identity of the caller  - to several search and rescue satellites always overhead worldwide.

If linked to an internal GPS locator, the devices would also provide their location with pinpoint accuracy, and in addition permit rescuers who subsequently arrive on the scene to hone in on its radio signal to locate it floating on the surface. . .

These devices could store detailed information about everything that happened to the craft, and possibly even the last several hours of what was said in the cockpit.

Making it possible for rescuers to locate exactly where the craft sank, and to find almost immediately - floating on the surface in the device's SSD - detailed information about what happened, would be far preferable than having authorities try to search thousands of square miles of territory, and then attempting to recover this invaluable information from the ocean bottom as much as 15,000 feet below, says Banzhaf.

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Similar nautical automatically-ejecting floating black box backups capable of sending personalized emergency rescue signals to satellites, could also have been used to simply and very inexpensively provide information about lost planes like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, says Banzhaf.

But now we are $160 million poorer, with no clue as to what caused the plane's mysterious disappearance,although a device costing less than $1,000 could have provided all this information.

It's too late for Malaysian Airlines 370, but it's high time commercial aircraft began carrying such simple and readily available devices, suggests Banzhaf.

http://banzhaf.net/   jbanzhaf3ATgmail.com   @profbanzhaf