Black Boxes and Coffin Corners

As searchers recover more wreckage from the Air France jetliner that crashed into the Atlantic last week, Miles O’Brien reports on the perils the jet faced as it flew headlong to its doom in a gauntlet of equatorial thunderstorms. In an interview with BoingBoing TV, O’Brien wonders why jets don’t transmit telemetry data all the time, moving the black box from the back of an aircraft, where it could be lost, crushed or incinerated, to computers safely on the ground. Any ideas, readers? [%comments]