Mark Rosenker, former chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, said this incident and the 2009 loss of an Air France flight in the Atlantic should spur reforms in what he described an outdated accident investigation process.

Rosenker, a retired U.S. Air Force general, said finding a way to transmit limited information from flight data and cockpit voice recorders to a virtual cloud database would help authorities launch accident investigations sooner and locate a plane if it got into trouble while out of reach of ground-based radars.

However, aviation experts and industry executives say it should be technically possible to stream flight recorder data to a database or a virtual cloud, but warned about broadband constraints and the high cost of equipping older airliners with new electronic equipment.

Streaming the huge amounts of data now collected by flight data recorders may also pose technical challenges, while transmission of cockpit voice recordings could raise privacy concerns, said analyst Richard Aboulafia with the Teal Group based on an earlier report.