IT HAS BEEN A DIFFICULT DECADE for airline travel and those who investigate accidents. June 2009 saw the disappearance of Air France Flight 447, with 228 passengers and crew, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. After a month of futile deep-ocean searches, the batteries on the flight data recorders' underwater locator beacons were assumed to be dead and the search was called off. Nearly two years later, the black boxes turned up after extensive mapping of potential flight paths. Investigators from multiple countries are still shaking their heads over what transpired in the case of EgyptAir Flight 804, which plunged into the Mediterranean Sea in May 2016 with 66 people on board. The Airbus A320's flight data recorders were recovered less than a month later, but the data proved to be inconclusive. With no clear explanation offered of what happened, theories swung from terrorism to an electrical fire in the avionics compartment to the pilot's iPhone overheating. Many agreed that if the airplane had been equipped 1 with a cockpit video recorder, investigators would have had a far easier time determining the cause of the tragedy.
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