I don't like the tone of this article. Articles like this were written after each and every single crash, which eventually led to sharper requirements, more certification, added security gizmos and thingies and more safe-ropes in every single corner of the aircraft. Most of that was reasonable, but care must be taken when making systems more complicated and static by taking what seems to be the easy route of "just adding a fix".

The reason why most of these systems seem anachronistic is not due to the high costs and financial pressure on the airline companies. Most systems seem so anachronistic because they have to be incredibly reliable and robust. Flight recorders are built to withstand about any disaster you can throw at them, which would be quite hard to do achieve with a modern cloud-enabled micro-electronic device. Even if we threw billions at the problem, it would most likely take five years to build a mass-deployable remote aviation telemetry system of the required quality level, just because making hardware is hard, and a half-assed solution helps nobody. It's particularly unlikely that a niche solution like the one suggested in the article works for everybody.

Don't get me wrong -- added safety is always nice. But let's take a step back for the moment. Let us not just put another whole new box into every aircraft after every crash. Instead, let's try and make the smallest possible adjustment to what is a well-proven, existing system already.

There have been reports after the MH370 loss that turbine telemetry data had been transmitted even after all other systems had failed. An small adjustment would be to lower the interval in which this signal was transmitted, down to say 30 seconds, provided the comm satellites are prepared to handle this. I'm not an expert on avionics, and I'm not claiming that this is the egg of Columbus, but surely there has to be a nice, small, lightweight and elegant solution, which incidentally is cheap on top of this.