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Hmm. Not sure it’s really necessary. They’re talking about live transmission of all the telemetry data. Seems like an unnecessary complication of a system that’s still working quite well. It’s not like there’s a big problem with recovery of black boxes. They are almost always found, and soon enough to be useful. Now there would have to be an additional powerful transmitter sucking amps from the plane, and somewhere somebody would have to be listening and recording all this stuff. Then there would have to be redundant systems to back that all up in case of failure.

For General Aviation, you currently have tracking packages which use the existing satellite phone infrastructure. In places like Alaska, usage of such a system is mandatory. The Iridium satellite people have a package that costs $995 for the unit, plus between $15 to $85 per month depending on usage. Figure for a commercial airliner it would be more like $300/month.

The data doesn't need to be as much as what the black box records. Just GPS position, airspeed, and altitude, transmitted once per minute would be good enough to find the plane, and have some idea of when it got into trouble. Ideally, they would put the unit somewhere it cannot be tampered with while in the air.