WASHINGTON - s4story -- A Pakistan-registered K2 Airways Boeing 737-400 is missing somewhere over the Arabian Sea, and authorities apparently have no idea where it is or what caused it to go missing and presumably crashed.

It's only the latest in a string of crashes where the location was (and in some cases still is) unknown.

But the problems of finding many lost aircraft, and the related tasks of recovering the "black boxes" with the information important in determining the cause of the accident, should have been made unnecessary by the simple application of existing technology, says Professor John Banzhaf of George Washington University, an MIT-trained engineer who holds two U.S. patents, and researches and writes frequently about airline safety.

For example, when Malaysian flight MH370 went missing, the professor pointed out that the precise location of its crash, as well as all the data in its flight recorders, could have been known and recovered almost immediately by using small devices commonly found even on small sea-going yachts.

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The devices are known as Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacons, or EPIRBs.  See, e.g.: . . .

More recently, he explained how, with existing data-storage technology, it would be possible for commercial aircraft to record in such EPIRBs, all of the data now stored only in their black boxes.

In this way it can then be retrieved from the surface of the ocean or other crash site without the problems, costs, and delays of having to locate and retrieve black boxes.

Even more importantly, they would have all this data - which could help prevent similar accidents in the future - even if the black box is never found and/or cannot be recovered (e.g. from very deep water).  See, e.g.: . .

They could also be designed to activate in the event of a sudden crash onto the ground instead of into water, says Banzhaf.

Similar devices used on aircraft ELTs (Emergency Locator Transmitters) are obviously insufficient, as several recent incidents of missing airplanes make clear.

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Moreover, there is no reason why multi-million dollar jumbo jets should not also have EPIRBs in addition to ELTs. . .

Similar automatically-ejecting floating black box backups capable of sending personalized emergency rescue signals to satellites, as well as a honing signal to searching planes or ships, and containing detailed data about the vehicle's operation and the last several hours of cockpit conversations, could also have been used to simply and very inexpensively provide information about lost planes like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, says Banzhaf.

It's too late for the K2 Airways Boeing, but it's high time commercial aircraft began carrying such simple and readily available devices, suggests Banzhaf.

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