With all of the difficulties piecing together what occurred on the aircraft, a friend and I were throwing around some wild ideas. One that I thought had some merit was to have all instrumentation output, voice and even possibly video (flight deck and cabin) continuosly downlinked to ground stations or uplinked to satellites enroute. Yes, this would be a lot of data  even with some type of encoding to reduce the volume and would be very costly to implement sonsidering the computing power alone required to correlate it in realtime, but considering that the information could saves lives, provide early warning to all sorts of troubles, etc, IMHO, worth it. Far fethced idea? Yes. Possible? I don't know.