The missing Malaysian Airlines plane carrying 229 passengers may have been found by now if Malaysia Airlines had upgraded its aircraft data-streaming — a system called Swift 64.
Flight MH370's normal means of communication—a transponder and the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System—went dead, but Swift 64 sends location data to satellites regardless of whether the regular systems are functioning. Swift 64 was embedded on the plane, according to the Washington Post, but not in the advanced form that provides satellites with information such as speed, fuel consumption, engine performance, direction and altitude at regular intervals.
The upgrade would have cost Malaysia Airlines $10 per flight.
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In the airline's defense, it wasn't legally required to do so. The best version of Swift 64 is only required for airlines that frequently traverse the airspace between North America and Europe, which Malaysia Airlines doesn't.
But at the very least, the upgrade would have provided investigators with much more information that could have pointed search teams in a more accurate direction, which is exactly what a comparable computer upgrade did for an Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
Unlike MH370, the French airliner didn't have defective communications equipment. Combined with the data from the Swift 64-like upgrade, that quickly narrowed the search radius to around 40 miles. The search radius for the Malaysian plane has expanded to some 2.24 million nautical miles.
Even in its more archaic form, Swift 64 has done something to help find MH370. Satellites pinged the plane every hour after it disappeared from radar, and it responded with a message that essentially said "I'm here," which is how officials know it flew for several hours after going dark.
That said, had the plane been equipped with the more sophisticated model, searchers would likely have been able to give the plane an almost exact GPS location at the time of its last ping, which is how investigators were able to pinpoint the Air France search area.
Swift 64 connects plane communications with land-based digital networks. It sends out those pings, which bounce off satellites and then heads back to Earth-bound networks. The more money airlines are willing to shell out for the system, the bigger the system's bandwidth and the more data it can send out with each ping.
So instead of the plane sending a signal that essentially just tells satellites "I'm here," it can provide a detailed analysis of where the aircraft is going — information that would have been a significant help had it been installed on MH370.
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