Indonesian Airline Missing in Flight - Unnecessarily
eTravel Wire/10115676

WASHINGTON - eTravelWire -- A Sriwijaya Air passenger jet carrying 62 people on a domestic flight which took off Saturday is still missing in a manner all too reminiscent of other flights which disappeared mysteriously, including some - such as Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 - which were never located.

But a very inexpensive and readily available device, if it had been installed, could have told authorities exactly where the plane went down, perhaps even in time to save a few lives, and certainly so that the wreckage and black boxes could have been promptly located and recovered.

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Moreover, such a device could also have told us the cause of the crash within weeks if not days, thereby helping to prevent similar tragedies, says MIT engineer, inventor, and now professor John Banzhaf.

Banzhaf says that in this era of smart phones and GPS, there should be no such mysteries.

Indeed, the plane's position when it went down should have been known immediately from a simple piece of existing technology known as a floatable EPIRB, and a miniature data recorder within it recovered within days, says Banzhaf, who has two U.S. patents and many technical papers to his credit.