The tail, sitting on the seabed at a depth of around 30 metres, was discovered on Wednesday near where the Airbus 320-200 carrying 162 passengers and crew disappeared off radar on December 28 en route to Singapore from Surabaya.

READ MORE: First pictures of AirAsia wreckage taken after tail is found on seabed

The pilots wanted to avoid bad weather but weren’t given permission to fly higher in time due to traffic in the airspace.

Three sources at the UN global aviation body ICAO said the tragedy has spurred more discussion about adopting ejectable black boxes, which may cost more but can float on the surface of the water, theoretically making it easier to find in the event of an accident.

The idea has bounced around the International Civil Aviation Organisation committees for years and is back on the agenda at its High-Level Safety Conference in February, the first of its kind in five years.

ICAO wants to develop a global system to improve plane tracking and ensure accident sites are found quickly as part of its response to the disappearance of a Malaysian airliner last year.

WATCH: How does a black box work?

“The time has come that deployable recorders are going to get a serious look,” said an ICAO representative who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. Deployable is the industry term for black boxes that detach from the plane when it crashes.

A second ICAO official familiar with the discussions said that public attention has galvanised momentum in favour of ejectable recorders on commercial aircraft.

“I think there’s a more positive attitude now because of the last few accidents,” he said in reference to AirAsia and an Air France flight that crashed in 2009 in the Atlantic. The Air France black boxes weren’t found until 2011.

Montreal-based ICAO, established in 1947, sets standards followed on most international flights, as the guidelines it develops typically become regulatory requirements in its 191 member states.

According to recently released documents, ICAO’s powerful Air Navigation Commission rejected the proposals for ejectable black boxes, and only approved changes including longer battery life for conventional models.

Ejectable recorders were invented by the Canadian government’s National Research Council in the 1960s and thousands are installed on fighter jets, including the US Navy’s F/A-18 jets, and small aircraft, like helicopters.

Unlike military recorders which jettison away from a plane and float on water, signaling their location to search and rescue satellites, recorders on commercial flights sink. Underwater, they can only be detected over short distances.

But a detachable recorder such as that made by Italian firm Finmeccanica subsidiary DRS Technologies costs about US30,000.

“This has been the pushback by (planemakers) and regulators - that deployables cost more,” said Blake van den Heuvel, director for air programmes at DRS.

The technology is also untested on large, commercial aircraft because of cost concerns and the lack of political will to require them.

A spokesman for Honeywell International, one of the largest makers of black boxes, said the company doesn’t manufacture ejectable recorders because it has not been required to do so by regulators or by its customers. Honeywell’s widely used, non-ejectable recorders cost about US$13,000 to US$16,000 each.

Mike Poole, a former expert on flight recorders with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, said transmitting data in real time would be a better solution.

“The current fixed recorders are highly reliable and cost effective and it is rare to not recover them,” said Poole, who now heads an Ottawa-based aviation consulting company.

Asked about ejectable black boxes, airline industry group the International Air Transport Association said: “There has not yet emerged an industry consensus on a mandate for ejectable flight data recorders.”

With additional reporting from Kyodo