I admit to a morbid fascination in watching Air Crash Investigation, but one thing intrigues me….the number of times you hear the captain say “ If only we had a rear vision mirror” when they have a crucial issue with engines and/or tail fin/stabiliser. One incident especially comes to mind…when a skipper shutdown the wrong engine on a twin jet after one flamed out. He shut down the remaining good engine due to a mix up with the controls…when a simple glance at a mirror would have told him where the fault was.
In these days if tiny cameras producing near perfect images surely these could be incorporated into modern aircraft design (or have they already and I missed it??)
Fighters have mirrors, but I’ve never heard of one on a transport.
Fighters have mirrors inside the cockpit made possible by the glass canopy.
With transport planes, the mirrors would have to be outside in the air stream and would create drag.
But with today’s technology, they could have cameras that can be aimed to the desired direction.
Some aircraft do have cameras. The A380 does, though I don’t think they are setup to look at areas for damage.
With reference to the Kegworth accident where the crew shut down the wrong engine, a mirror wouldn’t have helped them. There was some brief flames from the rear of the engine when it initially had problems and suffered some compressor stalling, i don’t think they’d have seen that with a mirror. Additionally all the information they needed to identify the correct engine was on the engine instruments But the crew were poorly trained for this type of problem and reacted with undue haste.
There are instruments that give this information at a glance - probably every bit as reliable as a mirror or camera could be - and pilots are supposed to be trained to check these before shutting anything down.
I know multiple retired airline captains who have never had a single incident in their entire career – no engine failure, no in-flight hydraulic issue, no need to divert to alternative airport due to mechanical issue, etc. How many car drivers have driven 30 or 40 years and never even scratched the paint or curbed a tire?
There are entire airline carrier fleets which have never had an Airbus on an operational flight degrade from the “Normal Law” flight control system.
Watching Air Crash Investigation is interesting but can give a misleading view. Modern airline flight is so incredibly safe that speculatively adding safety features based on a backward-looking historical perspective might not be productive.
Even if it’s as benign-seeming as an outside camera, if this is a safety item, then the plane could not be dispatched if the lens was fogged over or camera malfunctioning. As already mentioned I think the A380 has a tail-mounted outside camera, but I don’t think this is on the minimum equipment list for a safe flight.
There are other useful areas that might improve safety or analysis of problems but they are things like modified pilot training to better handle automation dependency, further cockpit resource management, cockpit video recording, etc.
The problem is when airliners are this safe it’s difficult and time-consuming to even measure further improvement (or lack of it).
Do jet fighters have rear-view and side-view mirrors
To be fair to this particular crew, they had vibration rather than a flameout and this model of B737 was new to them. The previous B737 model’s vibration indicators were a bit useless and tended to be disregarded. Still, if you’ve got vibration you’d think the logical thing to do would be to look at the vibration indicator!