Spiegel Online has the best analysis I have seen so far on the Air France crash. They highlight the Call for Airborne ‘Black Box’ Data Stream

If search teams fail to recover the flight recorder, which consists of two metal devices that record flight data and cockpit conversations, this question may never be answered. “It would be a real shame for aviation,” says Robert Francis, the former vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that investigates aviation accidents in the United States. “If we want to avoid dramas like this in the future, we have to know what went wrong,” says the safety expert. For this reason, Francis wants to see all important flight data transmitted via satellite in the future, using ACARS technology. “This crash demonstrates how valuable this technology could be,” he says.

The technology exists today. A simple change to the black box program is all that would be necessary.

Krishna Kavi, an engineer and professor at the University of North Texas in Denton, presented the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with a similar system 10 years ago. “The cost is low,” he says. For the 256 parameters recorded by a black box, Kavi came up with a volume of data requiring transmission of four to eight kilobits per second. “This is a fraction of what mobile wireless devices transmit today,” says Kavi.

There will be debates about the bandwidth necessary, the level of information to send, etc. just like with log management. This is a fascinating way to look at the problems that most organizations face everyday. Are you logging the right level of information to detect a failure in time and to avoid a repeat? It is not clear that AF 447 would have been avoidable with better monitoring systems, but it would certainly help with the speed and cost of post-incident analysis. Note that it is the pilots who seem to object most to increasing the signal rate and using surveillance. They claim privacy rights, to which the response obviously should be encryption.