It's almost 2020 and we're still relying on data that may or may not be recoverable from black boxes that may or may not be found when a plane crashes. SpaceX will soon be launching their Starlink satellite internet constellation which will offer high speed internet anywhere in the world. The Iridium satellite constellation has been in service since the late 90's and offers the same, albeit at much lower data rates than Starlink will provide.

With the miniaturization of sensors, ubiquitous internet availability and seemingly unlimited storage capabilities, why hasn't the airline industry as a whole moved away from black boxes? Throw some some machine learning at the data that is and should be collected and you've got an intelligent system that would greatly speed the investigation into crashes. The black boxes have served their purpose, but they're the VHS (or worse) equivalent in a 4K streaming world.

I'm not proposing retrofitting all existing airliners, but the Boeing 737 Max crashes have been new aircraft. Seems almost negligent to not capture, transmit and store in real time as much data as possible for situations like this.