The title kinda says it all.
In the event of an accident, high quality video recordings help everyone to determine what went wrong, who is liable, how to fix it in the future, etc. So I am wondering if Airports video tape every take-off and landing?
So do they?
Ficer67
I am not an airline pilot but I am an aviation enthusiast and flight student. No airports that I know of video tape every takeoff and landing. It would only be of very limited use anyway. It would only apply to accidents (very rare) that happen at a specific place and have a cause visible from the outside of the aircraft. There aren’t many of those and that is what the flight data recorders in the ‘black boxes’ + the cockpit voice recorders are for. They give the real data that can give a recreation of what happened. For something like an aircraft collision, Air Traffic Control data could be used as well and it is archived. A distressed aircraft trying to make a landing sometimes does have video evidence because people take videos of it with whatever they have available (see the famous Sioux City Iowa crash on Youtube for exmple).
Pilot checking in here. I’m not the world’s expert or an official authority, but I’ve never heard of that practice. It’s not unusual for amateur video to be shot, but nothing official or systematic.
In the United States at least there are legal problems with doing so. After cell-phone cameras became somewhat ubiquitous, many states passed laws prohibiting the use of any time of camera in semi-private locations. One such location that was frequently mentioned, health clubs, is where you will find the majority of airplanes.
Wow. 
But only when the flag is hoisted, “Don’t tread(mill) on me.”
I’ve never heard of an airport doing this, and while I’m not completely aware of everything going on in the aviation safety community, I am interested in it, and I haven’t heard any mention of this being something that investigators particularly desire, although any security or plane-spotter video of accidents/incidents is appreciated during an investigation.
The airports painted hazegrey do this.
Nothing happens until about a minute in.
When you consider the costs of the aircraft, of the airports, of the camera system and other systems associated with it. I think this sort of thing should be standard equipment on all airports.
Adding to this, amateur video is great, and I am all for it. But, amateur video is usually low quality, and the amateur is rarely in a safe position to view the incident. Most amateur video is dodgy, because the amateur has to duck/evade the explosion, crash, whatever. I would like to see very high resolution cameras mounted at intervals on a runway, on the control tower, and elsewhere as needed to observe and record any plane that lands or takes off.
All airports? There are thousands of them in the U.S. and tens of thousands worldwide. The technology is certainly there but don’t underestimate the cost for such a thing. Larger airports have multiple runways that can usually operate in both directions. Some of them are two miles long or more and various planes could potentially take off and land at any point on them. You would also need tracking capability to follow the planes up to a certain distance or altitude. Like I said, it could be done but what is the benefit? It would fall into the nice to have but not necessary category in my opinion even if it was essentially free. The flight data recorders are almost always recovered in crashes that happen during takeoff and landing. ATC data is recorded. There isn’t a lot routine video could add except news footage after the fact and that is only for a rare crash that happens right at the airport with an externally visible cause. Again, the other data already tells us that.
The last crash of that type that happened in the U.S. was in 2006 in Lexington, KY when the pilot tried to take off on the wrong runway. The cause of that was immediately apparent. The one before that was in 1999 in Little Rock, AR because of weather. Most survived but it is questionable whether cameras could have seen much in those conditions.