Why do airplane black boxes only record voice? Why not video as well?

[Machine_Elf]

@Musicat

I have no problem with your proposed analysis, but I can state up front that the costs involved are likely to be minimal. For $300 retail, I can buy a GoPro camera that takes up 1/10,000 of your hypothetical single-row of seats, and provides exceptional video quality. Redesigning for multiple cams and industrial quality is a trivial task for the right manufacturer.

Spoken as someone who has designed (roughly) similar (military-grade aviation) systems many years ago, so I have a little expertise, but not current. Since the trend is downward in cost, I feel confident that such a system is incredibly cheap compared to life costs.

You will also need to budget for installation, periodic inspections, maintenance, replacement. The FAA will need to develop specifications for each aircraft regarding placement, field-of-view, and so on.

According to some estimates, there are 20,000-30,000 commercial aircraft; let’s call it 25,000. Let us suppose that the net result of all the above-listed requirements is a cost of $1000 per year per aircraft. That’s $25 million per year. Let us further suppose that for decision-making purposes, the FAA does indeed value a human life at $1 million.

Do you believe that the information obtained as a result of fleetwide installation of cockpit video would prevent enough future crashes to save an average of 25 lives per year, every year?

A thorough attempt to answer that question would probably require going back over the history of aviation accidents for the past few decades and examining which ones have lingering questions about what actually happened in the cockpit, and making an informed speculation about scenarios which, if they had been recorded on camera, might have led to policy/hardware changes in the future.

[Voyager]

BTW, I’ve worked some with people who do military electronics work, and those aircraft have very complete flight recorders including video. You are able to replay pretty much an entire mission. In fact, I’ve been told that land vehicles have the same capability.
Of course the chance of needing it is much higher, and the expense is a lot easier to justify.

[GusNSpot]

It is always about the money.
Those that think any cost is OK if it saves even one life. Those are the ones who should pay for it IMO.

As to cost, do people have any idea of the cost of getting a system certified? The government red tape, the testing, the proving a failure rate of less than XX?

You think Go Pro will stand the cost of that just to sell 10 or 20 thousand units for world wide airline use? The government does not pay, the makers & buyers pay. The government just mandates. Do you think they will ground Southwest to force them to cough up the bucks to make this unit? Going to force a private manufactures to produce this thing at government mandated levels of durability, quality control & all the other things needed to get it approved?

Remember it is always about the money.
Ask GM about their pickup trucks. Cost of a recall vs the payouts.

What about other countries? How are you going to force them to do this? Going to keep US citizens from using those airlines? Going to keep them from serving the US?

You do not have to convince us, you have to convince the government, the airline companies, the pilots, the manufactures, the flying public, all the public as they will bear the cost of the added government expansion to implement this.

I would love to have a perfectly safe airliner, to bad it would be so heavy it could not fly.

Safer cars. Just mandate that they have to up to NASCAR standards and the occupants have to be garbed & restrained like race drivers. Many thousands of lives saved. Would it be worth it? Would the people stand for it?

It is not as easy as saying you can build. If you can, do so & be richer than Bill Gates.

If it is this easy, why has it not been done? You are the first one to think of it? Well, get off the SDMB and tell the world. It does zero good in here.

Note: All ‘yous’ or other things that in some way could be ever construed as aimed at any one poster, was not. Not picking or commenting to any person. This above is all IMO. And I have many of those that all cost the same.

[Dr.Strangelove]

@Broomstick

Dr. Strangelove, the problem is that those systems aren’t free, they cost money to develop, install, and maintain. Unless the benefit outweighs the cost it isn’t going to happen.

Of course they cost money. My point is that you can’t point at the most expensive possible implementation (“an hour at 2000F”, “3,400 g”, etc.) and from that immediately conclude that the system is not cost effective. There are intermediate solutions that are vastly cheaper and still cover a useful fraction of incidents.

[GusNSpot]

@Voyager

BTW, I’ve worked some with people who do military electronics work, and those aircraft have very complete flight recorders including video. You are able to replay pretty much an entire mission. In fact, I’ve been told that land vehicles have the same capability.
Of course the chance of needing it is much higher, and the expense is a lot easier to justify.

Agreed.

Also the military thought this was worth more than better armor for the vehicles & individual soldiers. They also rotate in National guard members three or four times into harms way with spending only token $$$ on rehabilitation, or making the ones with forever ruined bodies a lesser priority. IMO…

Also, the military can have many, & they do, items that do not work as advertized, can go over budget & who is paying? The manufactures? Bawahahaha All military equipment works and the cost is always justified, no matter the lives lost because of it. Go ahead, ask the grunts doing the using. & the dying, and the losing of body parts unnecessarily.

[GusNSpot]

@Dr.Strangelove

Of course they cost money. My point is that you can’t point at the most expensive possible implementation (“an hour at 2000F”, “3,400 g”, etc.) and from that immediately conclude that the system is not cost effective. There are intermediate solutions that are vastly cheaper and still cover a useful fraction of incidents.

Who decides the ‘useful fraction?’

[GusNSpot]

Oh, I see they have in post # 44 ↑. It was even quoted. If asked nice, they might lower it?

[Dr.Strangelove]

@GusNSpot

Who decides the ‘useful fraction?’

Whoever is doing the cost/benefit analysis. Obviously a system that works 0% of the time is useless. And no system–not even the current black boxes–works 100% of the time. The useful fraction is therefore somewhere between those end points. Exactly where depends on how the numbers work out.

The trouble here is that it’s difficult to estimate the future lives saved by such a system, because it’s not a safety system (like seat belts or fire suppressors). However, perhaps one could look at the military, where such systems are already in use, to provide a proxy for commercial craft.

At any rate, the analysis is easy after that point. You take the expected lives saved per year, multiply by the expected value of a single life, and see if it is less than the annual system cost. If so, then the system is cost effective. You run the numbers for several systems of increasing cost/reliability and see which one comes closest.

I should say that contrary to Machine Elf’s speculation, the FAA uses at least $6.2 million for the value of a human life.

[iamthewalrus_3]

@Machine_Elf

“…these occasions [when only video could tell us something that would save lives in the future] are likely too rare to justify the added expense.”

Ok, I get it.

And I agree that a cost benefit analysis should be part of it. And that it’s expensive to certify things for airplanes. Though, as long as we’re talking about a cost benefit analysis, it seems like part of the solution is to make it less expensive to certify things for airplanes, since the extreme costs and reliability requirements appear to greatly impede progress in technical innovation that could cheaply and effectively make things safer.

At least the FAA says I can read my kindle during takeoff now. That only took years, even with basically every flight taken anywhere serving as a validation that it was actually safe.

[Dr.Strangelove]

Meant to say: *…and see if it is greater than the annual system cost. If so, then the system is cost effective. *

[andrewm]

Not only does a proposed enhancement need to pay for itself in terms of lives saved vs. cost, it needs to be better than all the other ways the same resources could be used. I’d wager that putting the same investment towards extra pilot rest time, more practice/training, or more frequent equipment inspection/maintenance would save more lives than video recorders.

[Dr.Strangelove]

@andrewm

Not only does a proposed enhancement need to pay for itself in terms of lives saved vs. cost, it needs to be better than all the other ways the same resources could be used.

Not really. The usual way these things are handled is that you set a figure for how much a human life is worth (~$6.2M according to the FAA), and then try to do all the things that are cheaper than that. It doesn’t matter if some of those things are cheaper than others. In fact, any approach that is not binary (whether pilot rest time or recorder quality) should be scaled up until the marginal cost per life is equal to the target (I am making some assumptions here about mutual independence of safety approaches–there are certainly some complexities here).

Sure, you might want to prioritize the low-hanging fruit, but it’s not obvious that any exists for commercial flight. It’s already pretty safe, and any improvements are going to be hard-won.

[Broomstick]

I disagree - one low-hanging fruit for commercial flight is pilot fatigue. Too many airlines impose crazy-ass schedules that leave pilots short of rest. Controlled naps are forbidden on long-haul US flights, even though other nations have demonstrated that you can schedule naps for pilots safely during the cruise phase (obviously you don’t have all pilots nap at the same time, but some long-haul flights even utilize more than one flight crew) resulting in more rested and alert pilots for critical phases like landing. It’s sore spot that’s been mentioned for decades by safety organization but ignored by the FAA because the airlines would find it inconvenient to change current practices.

[Dr.Strangelove]

@Broomstick

It’s sore spot that’s been mentioned for decades by safety organization but ignored by the FAA because the airlines would find it inconvenient to change current practices.

I might argue that if the idea has been pushed for decades and still isn’t implemented, then it’s not really low-hanging fruit :). At any rate, there’s no reason we can’t do two things at a time. Pilot rest periods and video recording are totally orthogonal issues. I suspect that the real costs for both are in political capital, but even there the relevant parties are different: the airlines for the former, and pilot’s unions for the latter.

[Broomstick]

@Dr.Strangelove

I might argue that if the idea has been pushed for decades and still isn’t implemented, then it’s not really low-hanging fruit :).

Nonsense. The obstacles are purely political and public perception. As a result we have exhausted pilots taking unscheduled naps because they simply can’t stay awake any longer while corporate executives whine than any change will impact profits. They seem to forget that crashes due to pilot fatigue have both a literal and a financial impact as well.

[Richard_Pearse]

It doesn’t help that there is very little incentive for a pilot to report fatigue and plenty of incentive not to. We have a particular part of our schedule that everyone from management down to the line pilots agrees is fatiguing, however until the Authority mandates that we must change our fatigue management rules the company will not change the way pilots are rostered for this schedule. Pilots will also generally not report fatigue because there is a culture of “getting the job done” and also a feeling (unfounded in my experience) that reporting unfit for duty due to fatigue will result in negative consequences for the pilot. There are some pilots who seem to be able to sleep well during the day and don’t have big problems with fatigue on back of the clock roster cycles. For those of us who struggle with late night schedules it almost feels like a personal failing There is an easy fix for the schedule but it involves overnighting crews and nobody wants to pay for it.

Back to video recorders, there is no getting away from the fact that the benefits gained do not seem to be enough to motivate the relevant people to make it happen. That’s not to say it won’t happen, only that the motivation isn’t there yet.

[Kevbo]

Getting hardware flight qualified is a horrendous process. Takes years, sometimes more than a decade. This means most of what you find in an aircraft is years behind state-of-the-art. So how much video can you compress and store using 10 year old hardware?

Then there is the very real problem that by the time you get something certified you might not be able to buy the parts to build it anymore.

So you have find someone willing to build your obsolete chips etc. and that is expensive. Then you get to sell a few hundred or maybe in the low thousands of units, so you have to charge a bundle. Oh, and you get to go through a review and approval process for every aircraft type and variant that you retrofit.

This means you can add at least one if not two zeros to whatever any layman would estimate the price of any aviation hardware.

All this expense is reflected on the ticket price.

This means that there is huge incentive to resist changing anything unless there is a payoff for the operator.

There is also a psychological barrier. Th flight recorder serves no purpose except in circumstances nobody wants to think are likely to occur.

[elmwood]

From what I understand, black boxes record low-fi voice and analog telemetry data on metal wire, not tape. It’s because wire is far more durable than tape, and the recorded data will stay intact under much harsher conditions. The data capacity of wire is very limited, and storing video wouldn’t be possible.

[Musicat]

@elmwood

From what I understand, black boxes record low-fi voice and analog telemetry data on metal wire, not tape. It’s because wire is far more durable than tape, and the recorded data will stay intact under much harsher conditions. The data capacity of wire is very limited, and storing video wouldn’t be possible.

It’s certainly not high-fidelity audio, but it’s also no longer stored on wire, either. That’s going way back. Most recent technology is solid-state memory and store digital data, but I suspect there might be a few tape units still in service.

[Dr.Strangelove]

@Broomstick

The obstacles are purely political and public perception.

Low-hanging fruit is stuff that’s easy to do. Stuff that faces massive political and public obstacles is not easy to do. Nap time for pilots may well be important and have a low economic cost, but if it’s facing such strong pushback then it’s not low-hanging fruit.

And as Richard Pearse has pointed out, there are also cultural issues at play. That may be the most significant obstacle of all.