After watching every season of Air Crash Investigation it occurred to me how much easier it’d be to figure out the cause of a crash if airlines would simply put a camera in the cockpit. Hell, the technology is so cheap nowadays they could blanket the entire plane if they wanted to. So why haven’t they?
One reason is certainly bound to be resistance from the Pilot’s Union(s). It’s not completely without merit, either, I wouldn’t want every time I scratched my butt to be recorded on in-destructible media! Though it definitely would help investigations.
There would definitely be the fear that management would use it to nitpick every detail of everything the pilots did, and use it for punitive purposes even if there wasn’t a crash, as well.
They don’t only record voice. They record lots of instruments, like airspeed, altitude, engine status, etc that are a lot more useful than video.
Pictures of what’s happening in the cockpit probably wouldn’t help much, if the problem started elsewhere. It would merely show people doing their damnedest to solve the problem, all the way down to the ground. Instrument readings are more useful. Low light levels at night-time might make the pictures even less useful.
This was suggested years ago. I remember the pilots complaining that it would be distracting to them. There was even a picture circulated of two pilots, turning and facing the camera with big smiles on their faces as another plane appeared in their windscreen about to collide with them. (obviously a photoshop rendering)
Also, the airlines probably don’t want the video available for use by every attorney suing them post crash. I can see how innocent things might be misconstrued by lawyers and the jury.
Black box recorders are not cheap. They’re not just a cheap, unprotected SD card - they have to withstand being underwater, crashing, fire, etc. Video - especially of high enough resolution to be of any use - takes orders of magnitude more space than audio and sensor/control values. A recorder to handle that would be vastly more expensive, take up more space, and weigh more. And it probably wouldn’t add any value.
Also, we had this exact same thread back in March: Why Don't Airplanes Record Flight Video? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
Aren’t most crashes attributed to pilot error? There are a significant number where seeing what was going on in the cockpit may be useful.
We’ve had black box recorders in airplanes for decades, and the amount of physical space and weight required to record hours of HD video is significantly less today than the amount required to record just audio and sensors was 20 years ago. The technology literally fits in my pocket.
Now, granted, my cell phone probably won’t survive a plane crash, but you can certainly design a data storage mechanism that would, or you could add the video as an extra set of data. Available if it makes it through the crash, and if it doesn’t, you’re no worse off than now.
There’s no reason the technical problem couldn’t be solved if we wanted to solve it.
Look at all the other occupations where you’re filmed while performing your job: casino dealer, bank teller, prison guard, etc. What makes pilots special?
Yes, I know about the flight data recorder. The cockpit voice recorder is an entirely separate module. I’m asking why it only records one parameter–voice.
I disagree. If you watch the show you see many times investigators straining to figure out who is doing what, as they only have sounds to go on.
I can buy a 64gb microSD card smaller than my fingernail right off the shelf. A typical bluray with a 2 hour long movie at 1080p is only like 20-40gb of data. With compression you could easily fit in a video covering the longest trans-oceanic flight with room to spare. Fitting one–or even dozens as backups–in the same space they use for current recorders is hardly an unsolvable engineering problem.
I think it’s inertia. How long did it take for black boxes to become mandatory after the technology was first available? I don’t know the answer, but I’ll bet it was decades.
Look how long courts have resisted recording anything electronic. AFAIK, most now do audio as a matter of course, and some do video, but I don’t think it’s universal. “We got along without it so far, why change?”
And I think the next big change in this matter is for audio (and eventually, video) to be sent from the plane to a satellite system to be recorded elsewhere. This has a tremendous advantage of being immune to crashes, and can provide a continuous recording for maintenance and other purposes that black boxes do not now provide.
I think another new development will be small video cameras all over the airframe. So many fatal disasters could have been avoided or handled better if the pilots know that the cargo was on fire or an engine was missing. With video cameras tiny and cheap, I see no reason why there aren’t a dozen on each plane in critical areas, a surveillance system.
And think how different events would have been on 9/11 if the pilots, hearing a loud commotion, could have glanced at a video monitor to see cabin activity. They would at least have had a few seconds warning to barricade the cockpit door.
Didn’t say they were special. But they do have a union, and I believe it’s a fairly strong one at that.
Here is a pic of my son showing Dad around his new office. According to him, the little protrusion dead center (top of panel, just left of his hand) is a video cam that records the last X minutes somewhere. It seems one airline is doing this, although I don’t know if this is stored in the black box.
Aviation safety measures cost a lot of money to implement; in order for the expense to be justified, a meaningful number of lives must be saved. I don’t have a cite, but ISTR that the FAA used to use a rule of thumb that said spending more than a million dollars to save one life is not justified.
So then the OP’s question becomes two equally important questions:
how much will it cost to develop, certify, install, and maintain (per year) cockpit video recording systems,
and
how many lives would it be expected to save?
I can’t authoritatively answer either question, but we can all speculate. My guess is that it wouldn’t save that many lives above and beyond current systems. Between cockpit audio and the flight data recorder (which records the positions of a great many cockpit controls and switches), I don’t think it’s very common that investigators can’t figure out who was doing what at the time of the crash. Air France 447 was a fine example: investigators knew from the FDR that Bonin was pulling back on his control stick for virtually the entire time the plane was descending, so cockpit video probably would not have told us anything new.
No doubt there are cases where video would be useful, but it appears that in the FAA’s estimation, these don’t occur frequently enough to justify the expense of cockpit video surveillance.
There’s two “black boxes” (actually orange): the Cockpit Voice Recorder and the Flight Data Recorder.
The CVR holds about the last 2 hours of sounds from the cockpit. I’m assuming that the OP would want to add video to the CVR. Back when I worked on DC-9s, the CVR only held 30 minutes of sounds. Anything older that 2 hours is gone so I guess the pilots don’t worry about it as much. AFAIK they only listen to the CVR after a serious incident.
The FDR records all the other flight parameters and information.
There are, however, a few rare cases where it’s in dispute. EgyptAir Flight 990 comes to mind.
I think an argument that data we don’t have wouldn’t teach us anything is on pretty shaky ground. We don’t know what we might learn from video because we’ve never analyzed it.
The most obvious one to me, if we put a camera facing the pilots, is that we’d have a complete record of where the pilots’ attention was before and during the crash. That seems like it could easily be invaluable data for improving training and control designs. But I bet there’s all sorts of other cool things we’d learn if we started looking.
If we’re learning anything from the current big data revolution it should be that there’s all kinds of cool stuff you can figure out when you start recording and sifting through data that no one ever measured and kept before.
Could that off the shelf microSD card or blueray disc survive an hour at 2,000 F followed by 10 more hours at 500 F? Can it withstand 3,400 g’s at impact? Can it survive 30 days of immersion in salt water at depth of 20,000 feet? Can it survive 5 minutes of being crushed with 5,000 pounds of force? Can it survive being soaked in jet fuel, hydraulic fluid, fire fighting chemicals?
Before any flight recorder is installed in an airplane it is subjected to an actual fire test, for an actual hour at 2000F and 10 more at 500F, and a salt-water soak, and a crush test, and an impact test. Every single one. Then any necessary repairs are made and they’re put into airplanes.
If it can’t, it won’t make the grade. Do you honestly think that off the shelf components can survive all that?
All on its own? No. Neither would the memory boards in existing devices. Their survivability comes from being encased in a waterproof bag, insulated by fire-retardant foam, inside a thick steel cylinder. Not sure what your point is.
You’re right, but that’s not what I said:
To paraphrase: existing systems are, most of the time, adequate for identifying what took place in the cockpit in the moments before a crash. There are a few occasions where video info would provide useful additional info (and therefore save additional future lives), but these occasions are likely too rare to justify the added expense.
When I would see in the video that a pilots eyes were looking outside the airplane I would be hard pressed to tell if he was looking for traffic or day dreaming.
Yeah, even at night.
Hummmmmm
It can take a long time for changes to safety devices to come to some industries. Especially when it takes changes in laws and federal regulations to make the industry put new devices that cost money in their planes.
According to wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockpit_voice_recorder#Future_devices
If you read further in that section I think you can see why these things seem to take forever to catch up to technology.