I'm not talking about after it has reached the sea bed. I'm aware of some of the issues regarding continuous RF transmission of basic telemetry while inflight.

I'm not talking about after it has reached the sea bed. I'm aware of some of the issues regarding continuous RF transmission of basic telemetry while inflight. The bandwidth for all relevant flight info is higher than you'd think, and the receivers over open ocean are sparse. Et cetera. But still: in hindsight, relative to the high standards we expect from flight systems, the inability to localize a 777 is looking more and more, for lack of a nicer term: stupid. I'm reminded of the crash of an early Mars lander (Mars Polar Lander, 1999), which didn't have telemetry during EDL, so the cause of the crash could not be fully determined. They pretty much determined after that, that every Mars landing would have telemetry, so we'd at least know what went wrong.