GPS PLANES

Searchers continue to look for the wreckage of an Air France jetliner lost over the Atlantic on a flight to Paris from Brazil.

And that has many people asking why the plane wasn't equipped with a GPS tracking system.

The technology is available but commercial air carriers have been slow to embrace it.

The mysterious disappearance of an Air France jet in the Atlantic Ocean highlighted a little-known fact; sometimes airliners are flying where no radar or other tracking system can see them.

"It's a matter of cost, and vast areas of the world are just not covered yet," said retired Airline Pilot Vaughn Cordle.

Many corporate jets use real-time GPS trackers.

That's how the Coast Guard tracks ships on the high seas.

Even we in the news business use GPS to keep tabs on our crews in the field.

So why aren't jetliners equipped with real-time GPS trackers and would that make flying any safer?

Air carriers have been slow to embrace the technology because they haven't had to and because it would cost billions of dollars.

"It's a cost issue, because the systems they have now work fine," said Cordle. "There's a difference between what everybody would like to have and what they need."

The Federal Aviation Administration has been working for years on a next-generation navigation system which includes GPS.

But the global standards are still being finalized.

"The final standards won't be in place until 2010, and the FAA at the moment has given the airlines until 2020 to equip," said Graham Warwick of Aviation Week. "Until you have the standards, you can't go out and tell people that they have to equip because they don't know what to fit in the airplane."

And even then experts say GPS probably won't prevent tragedies like the air France crash but could shed more light on where and how crashes happened.

The FAA is pushing GPS as both a safety device and a cost-cutter, because it will allow more jets to fly in the same air space without fear of collision.