How many times in my 13 years airline tenure we had massive electrical incident in flight? Nada, zero. We had one engine feathered, one flame out but no major electrical failure. I think they should mandate to lock down the transponders can’t be turned off.
Disagree. Just because a system hasn’t failed, doesn’t mean it won’t.
Swissair Flight 111
Air Canada 797
TWA800 (if you don’t believe the conspiracy theories)
None of these are in the 13 year window you specified, but they do reinforce the idea that electrical faults can happen.
Airbus’s last jumbo project nearly failed due to complexity of the wiring. They had to undertake a major project to redesign the circuits in the system. When you have circuitry that complex, anything can be overlooked.
It would be much better to mandate a passively powered system... something like RFID chips embedded into the skin of the plane, can be powered from the incoming radar pulse, and when they squawk, they return their RFID to high gain antennas. Leave it to ground based stations to resolve the RFID to a flight. That is about the only way you could prevent a fire. And even then... one wonders.... if there is power in a system, there is a potential for that power to be inappropriately dissipated.
You could have various levels of redundancy, a system that steps in when the primary has to be turned down. But those need switches too.
Even worse, in a bad situation, you may every single watt available to the system for some other purpose, but if you can’t kill the transponder systems, those watts will not be available.
By not allowing an off switch, there is just too much potential for disaster.
I think a lock down on those systems will be a disaster in the making. At least the plane accidents or hijacking, etc. now are caused by nefarious people, not the systems designed to protect the passengers and crew. Having the safety & tracking systems in a plane be a possible culprit in a crash is wrong.