Airbus will fit deployable flight data and cockpit voice recorders on new A350 XWB aircraft beginning in 2019 and on the rest of its long-range fleet soon thereafter. A deployable flight data recorder is designed to separate itself from the aircraft in a crash. They are particularly useful for crashes over water where accessing or even finding aircraft wreckage may be difficult or impossible. Although exotic in the commercial market, they have a multi-decade history in the military market. The Boeing F/A-18 Hornet is outfitted with a deployable flight incident recorder system that is ejected from the aircraft shortly after the pilots, which has resulted in several recoveries of recorders that would not otherwise have been possible.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/recent-updates/business-military/airbus-to-introduce-deployable-black-boxes