[Soundy]

Part of the "problem", if you want to look at it that way, is also that in the complex systems that you're dealing with here, you can't just chuck in the latest tech and let'er rip. It's not like your car where you can just rip out your stock tape deck and hook a new DVD nav system. New tech has to be tested extensively to ensure it won't cause problems with other, more critical systems... that it will work reliably itself (nothing like putting in a new system "that will save lives" and then have to explain afterward that it didn't work because of something nobody thought of before)... so on, and so forth.

Then once you've perfected it, the various regulatory bodies have to test it again to their own satisfaction, and sign off on it.

By that time you're into it to for major coin, not just for your own R&D, but for the regulatory testing (oh yes, the manufacturer pays for all that too). Now you have to try to sell it to the airlines for a high enough price to cover your own costs, and they have to factor in their own costs to install it in their fleet as well.

Like hud says, now risk management comes into it for the airline - if you're the airline, you're thinking sure, it MAY let me track and find a plane that mysteriously disappears from radar, but how often do planes simply vanish into thin air? We have a half-dozen governments now looking for that plane, those search costs aren't coming out of my pocket, so what's my incentive to pay for this gadget? Besides, even if it does help me find the wreckage, the plane is still down; I still have to replace it.

Somewhere down the road, regulators MAY require it to be installed, but at that point the tech is probably a half-dozen years old or more, which the way things advance today makes it pretty much ancient compared to what you can buy off the shelf at Wal-Mart.