'FLIGHT RECORDER'S FLOAT'

Devices will be released and send a tracking signal for satellites........ to pick up.

Since the dawn of the jet age, flying has gone significantly safer. In fact you are thousands of times more likely to die while driving to the airport than you're flying in a plane.

Yet for all the safety advances, aviation safety experts have long been stymied by plane crashes in the sea.

The outboard recorders, known as black boxes, can be difficult, if not impossible, to recover deep beneath the waves.

But a new generation of recorders, announced this summer by Airbus and set to roll out on new  A350 airframes in late 2019, will make those boxes easier to retrieve.

Instead of going down with the plane, one of the recorders will be released and float back to the surface. It will then a send a signal that satellites could pick up, allowing searchers to pinpoint the location.

That could just be the first step in changing how data is recovered in plane crash.

Some industry advocates suggest that airplanes no longer carry their flight data at all and instead  live stream it to a central storage place on the ground.

But ''that future is taking some time to materialize all across the fleet,'' said Charles Champion, an executive vice president of engineering at Airbus Commercial Aircraft.

''The drawback to that is we don't have broadband everywhere,'' so streaming is not yet reliable enough to make onboard black boxes obsolete.

No matter how they obtain the information, investigators say it is important to learn the causes of air crashes :

''If you don't solve the accident or if it remains unclear, it can cast a pall,'' said Peter Goeiz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board.

''The way you do that these days is by looking at the data.''