Airlines routinely use satellites to provide Wi-Fi for passengers. But for years they have failed to use a similar technology for a far more basic task: tracking planes and their black-box flight recorders.

Long before Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on March 8, the global airline industry had sophisticated tools in hand to follow planes in real time and stream data from their flight recorders. But for a variety of reasons, mostly involving cost and how infrequently planes crash, neither the airlines nor their regulators adopted them.

One of the haunting questions about Flight 370 — how authorities could lose track of a Boeing 777 jetliner in age when an iPhone can be located in moments — persisted on Thursday as Australian officials said satellite cameras had spotted objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean that might be parts of the missing airliner.

Authorities counseled caution about the sighting, however, and the first Royal Australian Air Force plane to fly over the estimated location of the objects returned to base without spotting anything that fit the description — a reminder of how baffling the hunt for the missing jetliner has been.