They are not doing this to have fun footage to show in bars. If some electronics craps out during a mission, it is real nice to record what happened before and during the problem. The pilot is probably going to be a bit too busy to jot down the info.
From my being on a committee with people who do military electronics, and going to a few specialized conferences, I can see there is plenty wrong with the process. But this isn’t one of the things where they are wasting money.
what if that micro sd card or any other type of ssd media and its dozen backups was placed in the black boxes that already protect the FDR and FVR, although this does raise the question of how engineers have only managed to install enough storage for 2 hours of audio, are they using a very redundant raid setup that will rarely fail in a crash. i think from a purely engineering stand point it would be very easy to not only extend the voice recording time limit to something like the 25 that the FDR achieves, but also install video of the cockpit and even of other key components of the plane, i think as other users have said the thing that stops this is the Pilot union and pilots themselves
The amount of crash-proofing required to reliably protect even a small item from crash forces and fire in an major airplane accident is not trivial. They can’t put more “micro sd cards” or other such in the current black boxes because there is not enough room. Most of what you see when shown a CVR or FDR is armor and fire-proofing, the actual memory is quite small.
Every change in a CVR or FDR design has to be severely tested over and over prior to certification. This costs an incredible amount of money. You can’t just jam more memory or a new kind of chip inside those things.
At this point, it might make more sense to have video stream to outside the airplane rather than worrying about further modifying the CVR’s and FDR’s. It would be cheaper, could be upgraded more easily, and would allow the pro-video folks to demonstrate just how useful this data could be, which might be a better way to go if you really want the black boxes modified in the end.
In Europe, truck drivers hours are recorded by an electronic tachograph. The basic instrument (as required by law) records time spent driving and at rest, and the speed of the truck. Some companies want more information, so they record engine RPM, and ancillary equipment like fridge temperatures and the use of PTOs. They also track the trucks on GPS, so that they know where they are in real time. This information is often downloaded automatically as soon as the truck returns to base and gets within rage of their wifi.
Some companies also want to install video in the cabs. The reasons for doing this are usually sold to the drivers on health and safety grounds, but drivers naturally are fiercely opposed to being monitored to this extent. Unlike pilots, truck drivers are mostly not unionised, so pretty much the only ways a driver can protest are by sabotaging the cameras or finding another job. At present, the companies that experimented with it seem to have put it on the back burner.
I think that airline managements would love to see what their pilots get up to on those long boring flights. I am sure that the union would fight hard to stop them. The cost/benefit argument is not about the installation and operation but the cost of fighting a well organised federation of unions.
Actually, the details of the flights are recorded and it is downloaded and scrutinised by management via the safety department. They do know what we get up to in terms of what the plane does. They don’t know what we say or whether we are picking our nose though. The talking is saved to the CVR only and as yet there is no video. The everyday flight data that is recorded and reviewed by the company is not saved to anything crash resistant though.
Although this is an old thread - I’m struggling to understand why there is any debating…
Will a video recording help investigators in any way? It can’t hurt.
Can an HD video camera be placed in the cockpit? Yes.
Can the data be saved on to a small memory device? Of course.
Can this device fit inside a black box casing? Yes.
Can this data also be streamed to another location as backup? Yep, that’s the internet.
Are the Pilots happy to let video cameras into the cockpit? Ahh, I think we found the issue.
Airplane! instruments.
Also, why do we save the flight data and voice recorder in a black box at all? Couldn’t we just transmit it from the plane to the ground?
It would save all that business of having to send ships out trying to detect beeps from 20 000 feet under the sea and they’ve only got one month to do it and then sending a submarine down to collect it. Just transmit it live to a ground based receiving station. We could even have computers on the ground analysing the data as it happens - they might spot a problem before the guys in the cockpit do and can advise accordingly - “Engine number 1 is looking a bit ropey”
It does seem that the critical moments of flight data are often recorded after the aircraft has lost contact with ground stations.
If there is a sudden lose of power to all systems then that last packet of data isn’t going to be transmitted. And if it is transmitted there’s no guarantee that it will be received.
That already happens:
No doubt other manufacturers do the same.
The problem centers around this thing called certification. You can put NOTHING into an airplane as equipment that hasn’t been tested and re-tested and re-re-tested to a ridiculous degree. So yes, you probably could design a new version of the black box to fit around a video chip but you can’t just do that and install it on an airplane - there’s a crapload of other stuff that has to happen for the change to be legal. And that’s very expensive. This is a major reason that aviation tends to be quite conservative in some ways. The certification and testing system is so darned expensive.
As noted, this is already being done. It’s a relatively recent technology so until it is proven (by aviation standards, which is considerably higher than for consumer goods) it will supplement black box data, not replace it.
Also as noted, if something interferes with transmission you could lose data. I’d expect that the black boxes would be retained as a back-up measure.
Sure would have helped in the case of MH370.
Possibly yes, and 10 years from now both in-flight transmission and a link from a cabin camera to the black boxes might be standard… but it will take time and money for those changes to occur.