It seems that the Black Boxes of the airliner which crashed in the Atlantic may never be recovered and we may never know the cause. In this day and age surely it is possible for the data to be transmitted during flight - to be saved either on the airline's computer or that of the air controller at that time? The on board black boxes could be retained as backup.
yes it would be possible to transmit info to a land based comp via satellite (in the event of a mid air explosion there would be no time for this is its instant) but it would require billions of $ investment to do this