Motivated by recent events, considering how ubiquitous (and cheap) cameras & recording systems have become why aren’t they installed in every medium & up size airport to capture all runway & near flight activity (i.e. take-off & departures and approaches & landings)? Is it just a case of the FAA not having gotten around to it (I realize flight regulations are not modified haphazardly)? Is there some resistance by the airlines and/or pilots? The US Navy has been recording all carrier aircraft activity for decades now!
There’s been a thread on this here:
Short answer: A video of a crash is much less useful than the black box recording and the telemetry from the Airport Traffic Control tower (which is recorded). Using the telemetry you can generate a 3D animation or even a complete simulation of the flight path pretty easily and thats a lot more useful than video footage.
But the video that OP envisions is so much more newsworthy, to be shown on the Evening Action McNews! What could be more important than that?
But all that stuff wouldn’t cover things like a flock of geese flying into one of the engines or a thrust reverser coming off while the pilot deploys it. Sure, the telemetry will show the after effects, and eye witness might have seen something or they’ll be able to deduce it, but wouldn’t it be nice to pull up the video and actually see what happened (in a case like that).
FTR, I’m not sure on my thoughts on this, but I can’t believe it would be that expensive. Especially if they started out easy, asking, say, for one or two HD cameras on each runway mounted at the control tower and within 10 years 2 cameras on each runway mounted down at the actual runway (I’m sure they have wireless cameras that’ll work). Then require them to store the footage for some set amount of time that isn’t too long, maybe a month, so they don’t have to spend a ton of money on storage. Don’t forget, they already have hundreds of cameras in the terminals.
Well, we can have the NTSB/FAA/manufacturer spend weeks or months coming the area for parts so they can put the plane back together in a warehouse and figure out the a part sheared off and cut a hydraulic line as it flew backwards OR, we could have the ability to pull up the video and have a pretty good idea of what happened a few hours after the crash.
OTOH, crashes are so few and far between, does it really matter if it takes a few days or a few weeks to figure out what the actual cause was? Besides, most of the time (that I know of) it’s not like there’s mass groundings/recalls for things to be changed. But it might save tax payer dollars.
The news reports said that SFO was a good recording system. However, how would it automatically track every plane that came in over the length of a quite long runway. This one hit in a part of the runway it wouldn’t even should have touched down on.
In any case, If they did have film, they wouldn’t be releasing it quite yet.
Some people in this thread have watch CSI too much me thinks.
Video of this type sucks in quality, and there is no zoom in on this part button.
Seeing things like you are suggesting would require tracking the planes for long periods with telephoto lenses. Which means some kind of motorised automated tripod heads linked to plane positions.
A locked off wide shot of the runways from the tower just wouldn’t have enough resolution to be useful for the sorts of things you are talking about.
Yea, and black boxes don’t have fireballs. The masses want fireballs.
Well, sure, all that would cost a lot of money, but putting a few HD cameras down the length of each runway would, IMO, be a better option then having NO video at all for the investigators to look at. At least this gives them something.
If you look at this crash, or most crashes or even problems we’ve had with NASA lift offs or touch downs, they’re almost always grainy/low-res shots, but the investigators don’t sit there and say ‘well, this video is worthless’, no, they’re glad they have it and they watch it over and over and over and it helps them come to some sort of conclusion.
With this flight, it appears to be a crappy cell phone video, are you saying that it didn’t take days or weeks off the investigation?
Now that I think about it, I wonder what would happen if you put a wide screen camera, mounted sideways somewhere at the end of the runway? It seems like that would catch quite a bit of the approach/take off.
And FTR, I’m not suggesting every airport run out and do this, I’m just sort of thinking out loud.
Or just put about 20 fixed HD cameras pointed in different directions on the top of the control tower. Perfect footage? No, but 5 times better than a cell phone camera from 3 miles away.
Non-Expert Cost Estimate:
Implementation: $200,000
FAA and Gov’t Beaurocracy: $Tens of Millions
Crowd Pleasing Nightly News Footage: Priceless?
I saw some footage on the news this morning, shot by an amateur planespotter. It looks like the animation the news was showing the other day.
Also consider about a third to half of all airport activity takes place in the dark.
It shouldn’t be too expensive or difficult to implement now. Video may not be as valuable as Flight Data Recorders, but it’s not going to hurt, and might be useful occasionally.
Also consider they have lights on when they land in the dark.
I’ll disagree with this slightly.
We’re living in an era where we almost couldn’t fund air traffic controllers. Any additional expense is questionable. If everything that isn’t “too” expensive was funded, we’d suddenly have problems across the board.
Also, we live in an era that sometimes has too much data. The human genome project is a great example of the progress of science. But DNA sequencing has led to a deluge of data we can’t really deal with effectively yet.
Too much data can be bad. We run into it at work (not DNA but geophysics) where we deal with petabytes of data every day. There are several bits of data that might occasionally be useful. Ultimately, they mostly aren’t because there’s too much data for people to handle. It’s hard to separate the chaff from the wheat.
That’s not to say landing and takeoff videos wouldn’t be useful. I have no expertise to make such a pronouncement. But it’s not a priori clear that the extra data would be sufficiently useful to investigators nor is it clear that the benefits of such outweigh the costs of implementation, especially when the vast majority of flights in the US takeoff and land without a hitch.
If you don’t have a cite and you admit you’re just making up numbers you should probably keep that to yourself. It’s GQ, if you’re going to shoot it down based on cost, get some real numbers.
On today’s [SIZE=“5”]Action News, a tremendous explosion [/SIZE]in the price of lumber and President Obama dyes his hair.
It is easy find outside CCTV cameras for a few thousand. The recorders are a few thousand. Include installation cost. I don’t think my 200,000 is too far off. I am not going to try to get official price quotes from security companies for you. You can take or leave that number.
The point I was trying to make is that you and I would think of it as a “nice to have system” If it works 90% of the time and they get some footage, great. This would make sense to most people.
However, government bureaucrats don’t think like that. They know if there is ever some wreck and it is NOT on the camera, then they get yelled at. So to CYA they make the regulation that the video system has to have 99.999% uptime. This will need to be checked every 3 months by Certified Airport Video Uptime Testers (CAVUTs) to validate systems or there will be fines. It also must pass some super-specific milspec resolution test from an exact distance of 1037.5 yards and it must be tested every 3 months. The next thing you know there is one (or more) companies whose only existence is to provide this exact solution because it confuses everyone else. The cost suddenly goes up by a factor of 10. Or 100.
[COLOR=gray]Can you tell I’ve worked with the Government before?[/COLOR]
I can’t say it’s a non-trivial cost. And if it added nothing to the investigation it wouldn’t be considered simply because it might help some day. However cameras might be much better at picking up details like tail clearance and some other aspects of the landing and takeoff process. I don’t know how much it would cost, and even bearing in mind the ability of government regulation to increase those costs further, it is still something that every mini-mart can now afford. I think it’s certainly affordable enough to consider. Whether it would be justified by a cost/benefit analysis is unclear though.
Hummm, wonder how much it actually costs to keep the ILS system we already have up & working properly? There is a lot of expense in doing this, including flight checks. the system is really useful on a daily basis.
Now for cameras???
Easier & more useful to put cameras on the tail of airliners and one on a wing tip showing the aircraft. Can be used for training and problem solving & works at any airport. Video of a crash is just a bonus. They can be made or hardened just like the flight recorders.
Still I wonder about the cost benefit ratio. I do not feel it is good enough yet for the cameras to be worth the effort for the small benefit that would be gained.
Better to spend the $$$ on more & better training.