David Honig
fishing through wreckage for a crumpled black box recorder seems pretty old fashioned, too.
30K planes in the air before; maybe 20K now (or 30K 2/3rds full..). Lots of data from mobile senders. [Yes, some of the 30K are too small to be interesting.] Though now perhaps you could do it by piggybacking on the cellphone mesh? Cheaper than satellite. (Though what about hitting multiple cells, the non-EMI reason for not using cells on planes)
N years ago a robust tape recorder was the best you could do; N/2 years ago a solid state recorder became reasonable. For some value of N. Now RF (digitally encoded, bursty?) is feasible.
There is no reason not to have redundant systems - record locally and remotely. This goes for airline black boxes and personal record keeping...