Since the dawn of the jet age, flying has gotten significantly safer. In fact, you are thousands of times more likely to die while driving to the airport than you are flying in a plane.

Yet for all the safety advances, aviation safety experts have long been stymied by plane crashes in the sea. The onboard recorders, known as black boxes, can be difficult, if not impossible, to recover deep beneath the waves.

But a new generation of recorders, announced this summer by Airbus and set to roll out on new A350 airframes in late 2019, will make those boxes easier to retrieve. Instead of going down to the bottom with the plane, a recorder will be released and float back to the surface. It will then send a signal that satellites could pick up, allowing searchers to pinpoint its location.

That could be just the first step in changing how data is recovered in a plane crash. Some industry advocates suggest that airplanes no longer carry their flight data at all and instead live-stream it to a central storage place on the ground. But “that future is taking some time to materialize all across the fleet,” said Charles Champion, executive vice president of engineering at Airbus Commercial Aircraft. “The drawback to that is we don’t have broadband everywhere,” so streaming is not yet reliable enough to make onboard black boxes obsolete.

No matter how they obtain the information, investigators say it is important to learn the causes of air crashes. “If you don’t solve the accident or if it remains unclear, it can cast a pall,” said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board. “The way you do that these days is by looking at the data.”

The redesigned recorders are largely a response to two of aviation’s biggest modern-day disasters. Both highlighted the limitations of the current generation of black boxes.

In 2009, Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, killing all 228 people on board. After a multinational, multimillion-dollar search that lasted more than two years, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders were finally recovered from the ocean floor.