> I'm sure Find My iPhone probably has a limited range or something
Either I missed the sarcasm or this is the understatement of the century. There's no cell service in the middle of the Indian Ocean, several thousand miles from Australia. Not to mention the fact that radio waves travel extremely poorly through water.
The problem is that water is an excellent RF attenuator. Even if the phone was working, it would be useless even under a few metres of water. For this reason submarine communication is only one way and requires kilometre long ELF emitters (which everyone in the world can pick up). Above 20m depth you can use VLF, but it's still only one way.
The second problem is that phone location relies on there being a cell tower nearby (or a few so you can triangulate). You don't get a good reception in the middle of the Pacific, I'm guessing.
Not to mention the third problem that we're told to put our phones into airplane mode anyway. Even if the phones had WiFi or Bluetooth on, it's a higher frequency than GSM and has an even poorer range underwater.
The article's line, "In a world where a $100 smartphone can be tracked for free..." is dishonest. Services like Find My iPhone only work if:
1. The phone can determine its location via GPS, cell tower, and/or wifi positioning.
2. The phone has Internet access. (Cell or wifi.)
As you might suspect, the south Indian Ocean doesn't have many cell towers or wifi hotspots. GPS signals don't penetrate water, nor do the frequencies radiated by cell phones. Even if you had an unobtainium phone that survived the crash and depth, it couldn't be tracked.
It's only a little off. Services like Spot [http://findmespot.com/en/] offer satellite tracking with updates every 5 minutes while moving for $100 for equipment and $100/year for service. Spot doesn't quite cover the whole world, but Delorme InReach does [http://www.inreachdelorme.com/] for like $250 for equipment and $150 per year.
Given how easily available this technology is to anyone with a credit card, it's hard to understand how a $250M airliner doesn't have something similar.
The "$250M airliner" has the equipment, the issue is that Malaysia Airlines didn't pay for the service, no doubt they didn't imagine really needing it.
Well when the person who ultimate trust is placed in violates that trust it isn't something many consider there any viable counters too. GermanWings suffered a loss from what likely was a similar reason, the difference being that this pilot didn't send the plane into the sea.
I am not sure there is a viable means to guard against suicidal pilots except to speed up the acceptance of full automation
GPS works pretty much anywhere in the world, even in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It would not penetrate water or survive the crash, which means it couldn't be tracked NOW. Nonetheless, you could know the position a few minutes (seconds?) before the crash, which would make finding the aircraft MUCH easier.
I'm not sure why a plane wouldn't have at least a few such devices on board in case of crash (there's no monthly fee or anything). Just under the skin perhaps so they'd only automatically deploy during something catastrophic? I'm sure someone knows.
Even if it were water proof, it would only be so at a certain depth. The pressure asserted by the ocean would render it useless...and the density of the ocean above it would probably make the signal too weak.
While that's true at the very least (assuming that there really is a cheap worldwide GPS tracking available) the last known position would be much more accurate than in MH370.
That would make unnecessary the attempt to extrapolate the existing data (the pings) in order to infer the plane last location good location.
