> yet cellphone companies can put these devices in every new phone.
Many of these cellfone finders are not "global".
They do not reference satellites, Polaris, sun, moon, etc.
They work only where cellfone coverage exists.
In most of the cellfone area, multiple cells can "hear" you. They negotiate and the one which hears you best takes your call; but hands-off to another as you move around.
So if towers 47, 48, and 49 hear you, you are somewhere between them; if 47 hears you best, you are likely closer to 47 (of course this may be skewed by trees, buildings, etc).
I don't know, but "logically" another level of location can be found by comparing path delay. If tower 47 hears you and then tower 48 hears you 1 microsecond later, you are on a line 1,000 feet closer to tower 47. Three towers can, ideally, reduce that line to a point (at least a cocked hat). Strong multipath can skew this, but if the delay times exceed the known distance between towers, the anomaly is clear. Additional evidence if your cellfone has been on while moving: errors can average-out giving a firmer path to your current position.
Oddly, there is better cellfone coverage hundreds of miles in the sea off the coast of Texas than there is in Maine north of the Volvo Line. Must be all those oil wells. The airplane went down far off a poor coast; I doubt cellfone reaches. (However they have been saying the pilot "texted" a message, a verb coined for cellfones.)
I'm not sure how position data would have helped here. For one, so -many- systems failed in the last minutes, we must not assume any GPS would have functioned toward the end. For another, the general path and speed of the craft was known, simple dead-reckoning gives a probable area. Headwinds affect this, and the pilot will steer to avoid trouble; but trouble seems to have come on quickly so the error-area should be small. And indeed they found slicks fairly quickly, considering how remote the area is.
What bothers me is two slicks 60 miles apart. No explosion will do that. All I can think is that some major piece fell off, yet the rest of the plane continued at decent glide angle. If you assume a cabin-chunk falls near vertical, and the rest of the plane at 10:1 (a healthy airliner does better), then from ~~30,000 feet the plane would glide 60 miles past the chunk. Somewhat like the Hawaii Air airplane, except that one "only" lost roof-skin and landed in full control. This one may have been far more frightening.
> Yet again the airline industry fails us
"Failed"? There is a clear alternative: don't fly. Take the Queen Mary, only 5 or 6 days when she ran. Of course, while Mary ran well, some other ships went down, many with more souls lost than any airplane. Or do what most folks did before the Vikings and Columbus: avoid the sea, and if compelled to go by boat, hug the shore. Oh yeah: lot of shore-hugging boats were lost.
Yet Stephen and Marty take advantage of very affordable rapid travel for business or pleasure, repeatedly, and surely aware that nothing is certain except a tin can 8 miles high at 0.9 speed of sound is certainly risky. Marty is doing business, trade which might be less busy and profitable without rapid travel. And he could, instead, stay in London and dodge highway traffic, or go hermit on a distant farm and be killed by a bull or his tractor...
Yes, the current event can probably be "blamed" on the low cost of airline travel. There is a little too much pressure to fly in bad weather, to cover the airplane loan. And there is a little too much pressure to increase the payload/cost ratio of airplanes, leading to changes which bench-test well then crack a few years in service. And as more and more flying gets done, there is more chance of "unlikely" combinations of circumstances actually happening.
It is interesting that the Graf Zeppelin flew that route for many years, with zero excitement, not even a twisted ankle. And dirigibles are far more at the mercy of storms than 707s: their top speed is only comparable to a good storm, not 10+ times faster, their top commercial altitude is below the top of storms, while a 707 flies over most storms. And while weather radar may be thin in that area, there was none when the Graf was flying. -Most- peacetime dirigibles went down in unexpected storms (and the exceptions are instructive: the India was redesigned for such high payload that it creamed the first hill it found).