The UN's international civil aviation organisation (ICAO) has announced new provisions to help prevent future aircraft disappearances. The new provisions were unveiled yesterday, March 8, on the second anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 (MH370).

The amendments to the Chicago Convention, which lays down a bunch of aircraft, airspace, and airport rules for almost every member of the United Nations, are all within Annex 6 (the section that deals with the "operation of aircraft"). The three most significant tweaks are:

Aircraft must carry "autonomous distress tracking devices" that can "transmit location information at least once every minute in distress circumstances."

The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) must be able to store at least 25 hours of recording, "so that they cover all phases of flight for all types of operations."

Aircraft must be "equipped with a means to have flight recorder data recovered and made available in a timely manner."

Currently, due to a variety of different solutions used by airline operators and the limited reach of ground-based radar, aircraft can't be reliably tracked in real time—plus, when they do disappear, we can't reliably find the flight data recorder (FDR) or CVR. Civil airline operators will have five years (until 2021) to adopt these measures.

These new provisions move us closer to a proposed Global Aeronautical Distress and Safety System (GADSS), which was proposed by ICAO last year, again in the wake of flight MH370's disappearance. "Taken together, these new provisions will ensure that in the case of an accident the location of the site will be known immediately to within six nautical miles," said ICAO's president Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu. "And that investigators will be able to access the aircraft’s flight recorder data promptly and reliably."

Two years after Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared with 229 people on board, we still have no idea where it ultimately ended up. Through some clever analysis of its Inmarsat satellite tracking pings, it seems that MH370 flew off course into the southern Indian Ocean, way off the coast of Perth in Australia. In July 2015, about 16 months after the aircraft's disappearance, a portion of MH370's right wing was found on Réunion, an island about 2,500 miles away from where the plane is thought to have crashed.

We still haven't located any of the aircraft's black boxes, however, and we still don't know why the flight deviated from its original course.