3 ways to prevent planes from vanishing again

As we wait, what everyone in aviation needs to agree on right now is that this must never be allowed to happen again. Millions of us can be located immediately through technology in our handheld cell phones, but a 300,000-pound Boeing 777 with 239 souls on board disappears from the face of the Earth. NASA has the capability of photographing stars billions of light-years away, and yet our best minds are forced to guess where this plane might be, CNN reports. The airline industry has invested billions of dollars in technology that has made flight as incredibly safe as it is today. Yet many allow their aircraft to fall off any direct tracking capability as they fly over vast ocean distances and remote locations, confident that these planes will occasionally check in and reappear as they near the other side of the blacked-out area. But what if, as with MH370, they don't? It isn't like we weren't warned. Just five years ago, an Air France Airbus took off from Rio de Janeiro for a routine 5,700-mile trip to Paris. But the plane never arrived. Although the airline had received telemetric data that something was going terribly wrong and indicating in general where the plane had crashed, only the recovery of some large floating pieces of wreckage helped narrow the search area. Even after the search area was relatively quickly identified, the all-important flight recorders weren't recovered for another two years. Despite a series of well-founded recommendations by the BEA (the French counterpart to the National Transportation Safety Board), no meaningful reforms have been implemented. The International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations body that governs international aviation, has done nothing to order the tracking of transoceanic flights in real time and, in those very rare events when something goes wrong, to mandate equipment to ensure a successful search and rescue operation. For full version go to