[brandon272]

I'm not thinking of meteors when I describe a "catastrophic" event. I'm thinking of a fuel tank explosion like TWA Flight 800 or a missile hitting the plane or a bomb in the cargo hold going off or a stress fracture on the fuselage causing an inflight breakup. None of which have been ruled out on the Malaysian flight, I should add.

[pavelrub]

Those "catastrophic" events represent a tiny percentage of flight crashes, and a black-box wouldn't help to properly diagnose them either. Your argument still doesn't make sense.