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Why the Final Moments Inside a Cockpit Are Heard But Not Seen

jones_supa writes: There's no video footage from inside the cockpit of the Germanwings flight that left 150 people dead — nor is such footage recorded from any other commercial airline crash in recent years. Unlike many other vehicles operating with heightened safety concerns, airline cockpits don't come with video surveillance. The reason, in part, is that airline pilots and their unions have argued vigorously against what they see as an invasion of privacy that would not improve aviation safety. The long debate on whether airplane cockpits in the U.S. should be equipped with cameras dates back at least 15 years, when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) first pushed regulators to require video monitoring following what the agency called "several accidents involving a lack of information regarding crewmember actions and the flight deck environment." The latest NTSB recommendation for a cockpit image system (PDF) came in January 2015. Should video streams captured inside the plane become a standard part of aviation safety measures?

3 of 447 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Still photos by Ecuador · · Score: 5, Funny

    Unless there is a lot of jerking-off or running around in underwear going on, I generally don't see how even video is much of an invasion compared to audio...

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    Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
  2. Re:Still photos by Ecuador · · Score: 5, Funny

    Perhaps they are afraid the general public will find out why it is called a "cockpit"?

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    Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
  3. Re:Fuck flying by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Funny

    Are you crazy enough to trust your life to a wetware computer we can't even understand with any real confidence? There are 100,000 miles of blood vessels in your body, and if just the wrong one clots up, it's over for you. Many important components have no redundancy. Fatal malfunctions regularly occur with no way to repair them. Worst of all, you don't even have an offsite backup system for your most critical data.

    That's basically what your body is. If you're dumb enough to rely on an organic life-support system designed through random trial and error, you deserve to die in a messy pile of organic failure.

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    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.