[001sky]

Laugh all you want, but the tech is pretty simple. You need to look at what it is doing. Replacing a transponder with something that is much simpler than an epirb. The example I gave is a $100 dollar current piece of tech that weigs 150 grams including power-source, and if it was available to LOS througha window could track the plane for 4-7 hours off a single set of batteries. If you want to raise the budget for an order of magnitude or two, for 10k dollars you could surely create a redundant system for the transponder.

The larger point is that any "real situation" that would need the transponder turned off (power/fire/corruption) would have almost no bearing on the operability of such a simple system.

FYI the imarsat pings are not all that different, are they? Its just a simple ping with some data that including headers is going to be very minimal payload...like SMS text type level of data.