Why don't flight data and cockpit recorders have GPS trackers?

Unless you've been living under a rock these past few days, there was a Malaysian Airlines flight that vanished off the radar mid-flight en route to Beijing with over 200 people on board. There's been absolutely no wreckage found including most importantly, the flight data and cockpit recorders.
These two recorders are extremely valuable when investigating any sort of incident that takes place on a plane.

So I was wondering, why don't they have GPS trackers on them?

Planes themselves are extremely high tech so what's the problem with shoving a simple GPS tracker on the recorders? I don't actually understand. Or am I missing something really important and there's a really legitimate and obvious answer that's just flown over my head?

Unless you've been living under a rock these past few days, there was a Malaysian Airlines flight that vanished off the radar mid-flight en route to Beijing with over 200 people on board. There's been absolutely no wreckage found including most importantly, the flight data and cockpit recorders.
These two recorders are extremely valuable when investigating any sort of incident that takes place on a plane.

So I was wondering, why don't they have GPS trackers on them?

Planes themselves are extremely high tech so what's the problem with shoving a simple GPS tracker on the recorders? I don't actually understand. Or am I missing something really important and there's a really legitimate and obvious answer that's just flown over my head?

If I remember correctly, GPS signals can't be transmitted through water. I may be wrong.

If I remember correctly, GPS signals can't be transmitted through water. I may be wrong.

Excellent pun.

To answer your question, I don't know.

This whole thing just seems odd to me. I mean, how can a plane just disappear off the radar, and how come no-one noticed straight away? What happened to all the other tracking devices that should have been on the plane, with GPS being a key example? Why were no distress calls made, or even a 'crash' button hit if it was hijacked?


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My guess is that some critical system (or systems) completely lost power so there was nothing to send a distress signal with. A user above mentioned the tracking thing stopped transmitting while at cruising altitude, which would fit with this. If they were over the sea then passenger's mobile phones probably wouldn't have signal.

Having said that, the engines should still remain running and the pilot should at least be able to control the plane should something like this happen, so this doesn't really everything.

My inclination is to suggest that it was an accident cause by mechanical or electrical failure rather than a hijacking.

The plane's most likely at the bottom of the ocean by now.

Yeah, that sounds fairly likely to me, too. As you say though, a good pilot should be able to keep going for a little bit without engines- the planes are designed to do so as much as possible! That could explain the turning back before the signal was lost, but still not the lack of wreckage as they have a pretty good idea of where the plane should have been at the time, sea currents etc.


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