WHILE the search goes on for the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines plane that vanished en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, one needs to keep in mind that more than eight million people fly every day and, while even one plane accident is one too many, statistics show it's still safer to fly than to cross the road in a busy city.

There's an urgent need to find out what happened to the MH370 Boeing 777-200, not only to bring closure for the grieving relatives but also to understand the cause of the plane's disappearance. For this reason, the major focus of the search effort would be to retrieve the plane's "black box" or flight recorder. The black box, which actually is bright orange in colour, records vital flight data and is designed to survive a crash. It is an invaluable source of information in case something goes wrong. For example, initially it was thought that the Air France Airbus A330 accident over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 was due to a mechanical fault in the plane. However, after its black box was recovered from 4km under the sea following a two-year search, its data showed that the accident was not due to a technical fault in the aircraft. The biggest disadvantage of a black box is that it can be accessed only after finding the crash site. This can be a major challenge if the plane crashes into water. With more people flying every day, airlines and international bodies such as the International Air Transport Association need to explore alternatives to the black box. Modern planes allow passengers to surf the Internet at near-broadband speeds 35,000 feet in the air via satellites, and yet there is no system in place to stream vital flight data to receiving stations on the ground. The technology exists to allow this to be done relatively easily.

In the case of the MH370 accident, if investigators and rescue teams had access to the telemetry data of the plane until the time it disappeared, they would have found the wreckage by now. When a plane flies over land, it's usually always within the radar range of either the air traffic controllers at various airports along the route or other installations such as military radar. However, when a plane flies over water, particularly in areas several hundred kilometres from land, it is very much on its own. This explains why it is so difficult to find a crash site if a plane goes down over water.