Yet nearly one year ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished, taking the lives of 239 passengers and crew in one of aviation's greatest mysteries. The flight was supposed to remain mostly over land, well within the coverage area of ground-based radar stations. Airlines and regulators spent the past year debating how much flight tracking is necessary, balancing the economic costs against reassuring travelers another plane won't disappear. In an age when a missing iPhone or a FedEx package can be tracked, it's unfathomable that something the size of a Boeing 777 could never be found. British satellite communications company Inmarsat, which helped investigators determine the final flight path of Flight 370, says 11,000 commercial planes already have its satellite connection, representing more than 90 percent of the world's long-haul fleet. Any plane with 19 seats or more, built after 2020, would be required to automatically transmit its location every minute if the plane deviated from its route, made an unusual move such as a sudden drop or climb in elevation or if a fire was detected. Before Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic in 2009, the airline had already had programmed its long-range aircraft to report their position every 10 minutes. [...] streaming live data on a plane's performance, which is similar to what's in the flight data recorders recovered after a crash, could cost $7 to $13 a minute depending on the amount of data sent.