I keep thinking they need to put a black box on the top of these planes that auto ejects at the first sign of crashing and can float etc.
Or just continously upload the data to the internet, should be quite feasible these days with satellites everywhere.
That would probably be a bit too much for existing satellite communication systems; while most flights wouldn't need to transmit such a signal most of the time (If a plane went missing over, say, the Midwest, we'd find it!), frequent transmissions from every flight over sea, for instance would probably overload today's networks - meaning you'd need to launch new satellites to provide this service, meaning it would be outrageously expensive, meaning it wouldn't happen.
However, if we relax the requirement to, say, once every five minutes or so, at least you'll have a much better idea of where something went down than 'Probably somewhere in the southern hemisphere.'