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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?
We already have a pretty good idea of what happened to the Germanwings flight even with 1 damaged black box.
A compromise could be the use of still photographs. Even with one photo per 10 seconds, it would give you a lot of extra information. As far as privacy, I would feel that the audio capture is a bigger invasion of privacy than a bunch of photographs.
An interesting note is that we do have cockpit video of the SpaceShipTwo disaster because no such union was involved, and it did seem to result in useful information. Still not sure which side of the issue I land on. I know I wouldn't want to be videotaped 24/7 at work.
would probably help more. exactly how many plane hijackings have been prevented by locked doors in the last 14 years ? that's the problem with security theatre - there's no stepping back until it takes a violent end (e.g. totalitarian society).
Perhaps they could video the cockpit (and the fuselage for that matter) and destroy the footage once the plane has safely landed. There could be streaming capability to the ground and if the feed is accessed, the pilots and crew receive a notification. Any unauthorized breach would be detected immediately. In the case of Germanwings, ground control would have been able to see what's going on once they detected the loss of altitude. It stifles me that in 2015, a young troubled copilot can end 150 lives in a way that can easily be prevented with simple technology.
Looks like the memory card on the the black box has been "lost". Is this true? How is it possible if the black box is designed to withstand 3500 g ?
It's not. One being damaged, once in a blue moon. Two, as Oscar Wilde would have put it......
Also, why isn't data streamed to ground stations nowadays? And why black boxes do not float ?
Good question.
I'm for it would be wonderful data to have, going to be pretty dull to have video all of the staff though, and as is stated above the first thing people wil learn is how to block the cameraview.
Nice try my little Kurt Nonnegut!
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Tens of thousands according to the logic of all the non-hijacked flights, right?
That's also covering the TSA screenings, and every bit of the Patriot Act.
The success is self-evident. We're safer now citizen, and you have the loss of your freedom to thank.
Say you appreciate it. Say you love Big Brother. Say it. Say it. Say it!
exactly how many plane hijackings have been prevented by locked doors in the last 14 years ?
All of them? None of them?
THE REINFORCEMENT of cockpit doors on most commercial airliners was perhaps the most important change to air travel in the wake of the September 11th attacks.
There's security theater (screening everyone; banning liquids and gels over a certain amount) and prudent security measures. The only thing were really need is to have a metal detector, bomb sniffer and locked cockpit doors to prevent hijacking of aircraft and their use as flying weapons. That will stop most of the terrorists from hijacking a plane or causing an air disaster.
So why not record pilots? After all, their cargo is much more valuable.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
A compromise would be to record it on a 15 minutes circular buffer. No privacy issue, except in case of crash.
A $300 gopro recording to a $100 128GB MicroSD chip would add $150,000 to the cost of each plane and would be easily defeated with duct tape.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Someone like Andreas Lubitz could have just reached up and stuck something over the camera lens. That's if he even cared about being filmed, which is doubtful. From what we're hearing about his desire for notoriety, he'd have probably loved to have those last moments caught on camera and broadcast around the world.
We're probably going to see a lot of TV news shows and newspapers calling for cameras in cockpits, but it won't be anything to do with safety, it will be because the footage has commercial value to news organisations.
while cockpit video cameras may help determine the cause of some crashes, there are plenty of recent examples where it wouldn't help.
For example if Malaysia airlines had cockpit video, it would not tell us who fired the missile and why. *for the one shot down in the Ukraine) and we don't have any black boxes from the other one (at the bottom of the indian ocean)
Aux control rooms are for big ships where the primary has been destroyed by enemy fire, etc.. In an airplane, it would be a second point of vulnerability and an additional source of failure even if there's no attack..
To fix the problem of this particular crash, put a potty in the cabin - not that I'm seriously suggesting it, just a thought to work with.
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Would you let someone stick you in a tube of metal and then blast you into the air at 500+ mph?
Well, that's basically what flying is. If you're dumb enough to do that, you deserve to crash in a pile of smouldering flames.
That's not really what flying is at all. Sounds more like rocketry. Aircraft accelerate to 500+ mph in a really quite smooth and comfortable way, at least in commercial aviation. And as intelligence might well be defined by an ability to make good choices based on available information the fact that aviation is, currently, both safer than ever and really really safe means choosing to fly, on the basis of piles of "smouldering flames" is really not a dumb decision.
Anywhere military secrets are visible is a poor choice for video surveillance.
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Well, that's basically what flying is. If you're dumb enough to do that, you deserve to crash in a pile of smouldering flames.
That's some major league victim blaming there. Let's see if we can blame the victims of the Titanic for "letting someone stick them in a big tub of riveted metal and setting them afloat on the world's second largest ocean". Or maybe we can blame the dinosaurs for being stupid enough to live on a big rock with only one inadeuately small moon to help protect it from once-in-a-gazillion-years meteor strikes. Stupid dinosaurs -- they really had it coming.
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If there's an actual case for safety, I'll all for it.
But so far the people advocating for it are clearly motivated by voyeurism.
Looks like the memory card on the the black box has been "lost". Is this true? How is it possible if the black box is designed to withstand 3500 g ? Would the data on the memory card contain information on the door status (locked / unlocked / open / closed /...) ?
Also, why isn't data streamed to ground stations nowadays? And why black boxes do not float ?
In short, together with the door design, it all looks like amateuristic design.
1. Door-locked status: Don't know, but you can't record everything -- there are already plenty of channels that are captured that are far more important
2. Streaming to ground: The NTSB has been working with other air safety bodies to make recommendations to do just that. One issue is available bandwidth: there just isn't enough of it available. So the amount of information that can be transmitted would be limited.
3. Floating black boxes: Like the downlink scenario, breakaway recorders that float are being looked into. More importantly, though, are better crash locator beacons, so the crash debris field can be found more quickly.
I think the prudent response to this incident would be to mandate that two members of crew should be on the flight deck at all times, so that there is always someone available to open the door. In practice, that would mean that the senior cabin crew member would have to step in whenever the pilot or co-pilot needs to go for a pee.
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Or just have a senior member of cabin crew step onto the flight deck whenever one of the flight crew steps out so that there's always two people in the cockpit at any given time, and one can open the door if the other is incapacitated.
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would probably help more. exactly how many plane hijackings have been prevented by locked doors in the last 14 years ? that's the problem with security theatre - there's no stepping back until it takes a violent end (e.g. totalitarian society).
One Jet Blue flight was protected by locking the pilot out after he went crazy.
Most large airliners today have some kind of in-flight cell phone/internet access. Apparently the flight recorder data is about 6 kbps, if you want to include the cockpit voice recorder you may double that. You'd immediately know when it goes dark and send out a search&rescue party, it can't get lost or destroyed in a crash, you would have data right away not days and weeks later and you could often deduce the problem long before you find the boxes.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A camera inside the cockpit and a camera outside at the door. There should be a remote door unlock capability that allows a locked out person to access the cockpit. They knew there was a problem before the crash. They could have monitored the door and cockpit and unlocked the door remotely.
E Proelio Veritas.
Get rid of human pilots. Planes have been able to fly and land themselves for decades now. Strangely, we change laws to allow testing and use of driverless cars that are fairly primitive but well-developed technology that flies planes and lands them is not trusted. Start with one plane on one route and give steep discounts on tickets.
E Proelio Veritas.
Now that airliners are becoming fly-by-wire machines, how hard would it be to add a second cockpit?
Think of turning an A320 or a 787 into a drone, with the pilot and copilot in separate drone control compartments perhaps with one at the nose of the plane and the other at the tail. In a situation like this last one, the remaining sane pilot would request that ground control lock out the controls of the crazy one. If ground control judged that both pilots were incapacitated, then a drone control station on the ground could take over flying the plane. This design would also discourage hijacking, provide better redundancy of some critical systems, and in some worst case scenarios, allow a ground control officer to land a plane whose pilots had both become unconscious, as in a sudden decompression incident.
It undoubtedly would take years to adapt current drone technology, pilot training, and airframe design to make the best use of this approach. That is all the more reason to get Boeing, Airbus, and the rest of the industry working on this.
Will
Which is the requirement in the US and has become the requirement in many other areas in the wake of this incident.
IMO the most important change to air travel following the September 11th attacks happened before the attacks were over. Passengers realized that a hijacking could end with their deaths and the deaths of others. Now any hijackers will have to deal with all the passengers of the plane rather than just one or two people.
The pilot is sitting in an aircraft he doesn't own. There's almost never just one person in the cockpit (at least from now on in the Germanwings case.) A side-factor is the pilot is directly responsible for the lives of hundreds of people.
Exactly where does this right to privacy come from in this case?
If someone wants to stand behind me and watch while I work I could care less. Heck, when I pair-program that's exactly what happens. It's not my computer, not my desk, and not my office. If I wanted complete privacy I'd work as a contractor at my house.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
... even hundreds of people's lives are in your hands, you have no right to an expectation of privacy regarding your actions that directly affect those lives.
I'd have thought the main reason was that technology moves incredibly quite slowly and takes forever to catch up with the "real world" when it comes to such vital systems as black box recordings.
Microphones are much simpler devices than cameras, and in any case they are a required part of the kit for normal operation of a flight.
Should video streams captured inside the plane become a standard part of aviation safety measures?
Asking a question like that makes it sound like you think someone just needs to flip a switch and it's done.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
, and as such, they are subjected to higher levels of surveillance due to their greater potential for disobedience to their masters.
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we should also put camera's on computer programers to see if they are slacking off or picking their noses.
Camera camera camera. the benefits of surveilance are not a sufficient reason to overcome the pervasive invasiveness. pychologically were a private species.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Unless of course, somebody calmly walks the front of the plane, enters the cockpit, and takes over the controls by force. You don't need to inform the passengers first.
Lose the Unions they're so 19th century.
No, wait. That came out wrong.
It could be made a requirement to have three people so in case of a fight you have 2 people vs 1. But it will be quite expensive.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Only one thing I disagree with - bandwidth costs. The FDR [apparently] records at about 6kB/s (I'm trying to find a source to back that up), so that's 6kB/s per aircraft in satellite data costs. There can be up to 11,000 aircraft flying at any one time, so that totals 66MB/s of bandwidth required globally. I don't believe lack of bandwidth is a factor.
Bandwidth is apparently between 5 and 7 USD per MB, so about 4c per second. In comparison, and A320 consumes about 665 gallons of fuel per hour, equating to about 29c per second. It's not an insignificant increase in cost. Along with that, the cost of equipment, certification, etc is why we haven't seen it yet, though I believe there are working groups.
There is also the issue that it will always be possible for the flight crew to pull the breaker on the transmitter, much like they can pull the breaker on the CVR (and probably the FDR), so that doesn't solve the issue when it comes to a malicious agent.
If it was streamed it could be hijacked, now you have to be careful about potential implications, about floating I do not know.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Do we seriously expect a guy to spend several hours doing nothing but watching a computer do its job without jacking off at least once?
In an era where I can purchase trans-atlantic wifi for $15, it seems archaic to me that we still rely on hardened "black boxes" for data retrieval. Why is audio from the flight deck not REQUIRED to be streamed real-time to satellites in orbit for commercial airliners? Yes yes, it won't be 100% reliable blah blah. So what? No one is advocating REMOVING the black box.. there is no reason you can't have both.
Would you let someone stick you in a two-tonne metal box on wheels and send you hurtling down a flat piece of ground at 100kph, in a crowd of other 2+ tonne metal boxes doing the same, while not three feet away is another crowd of 2+ tonne wheeled metal boxes going 100kph in the opposite direction... and the only thing preventing utter disaster is the reflexes and attention span of the average human being?
That's basically what driving is. If you're dumb enough to do that, you deserve to crash in a pile of twisted wreckage and flaming gasoline.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
A locked and reinforced cockpit door prevented hijackers from gaining entry to a Chinese flight a few years back. Members of the crew and some off-duty policemen among the passengers fought back and subdued the entire group of hijackers - even killing two of them in the struggle. There have apparently been other hijackings in which the criminals never gained entry to the cockpit either, instead holding either passengers or the plane itself hostage with weapons or bombs respectively.
Locked doors may also have deterred other hijackings in recent years, along with the realization that passengers seem far more likely to react by attacking and subduing the hijackers on their own, though of course you really can't know for sure one way or another. It seems as though 9/11 permanently altered the "rules" of airline hijackings when it was realized that airliners could be turned into extremely deadly guided missiles powerful enough to take down the largest structures. At that point, instead of dealing with hundreds of dead, you could be looking at many thousands of dead.
It's true a pilot could conceivably do the same thing in the future, and I'm not sure there's ever really a way to prevent that from happening. The copilot could just have easily have switched to manual control and pushed the nose of the plane straight into the ground just prior to landing, and there would be no way for the pilot to react in time since this would only take a few seconds. As such, I think the locked and reinforced door still seems like the safest option. As horrible as this event was, it remains an even rarer occurrence than hijackings, even though we've seemed to have a recent uptick.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
All the sensor data and controls should go into the box; that will tell you what was going on far far more than a blurry video. You could store the state of every single control in detail over time for hours in the space it takes to store a few frames of video. Besides that you could use such information to find patterns in how they handle disaster situations which could be used for education and design... and A.I. Pilot suicides like this are extremely rare... but we want to spend a ton of money so we can watch the person tilt the thing down into the ground on CNN in a loop for a few days.
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OnStar: "Hello Captain Rittamer, this is OnStar, how may I help you?"
Captain: "I seemed to have been locked out of the cockpit by my suicidal/homicidal copilot, could you open the door for me please?"
OnStar: "I see that your copilot has directed the plane to crash in the Alps. I'll open the door for you right away so you can correct that."
Captain: "Thank you very much!"
OnStar: "Is there anything else I can do for you today?"
A locked and reinforced cockpit door prevented hijackers from gaining entry to a Chinese flight a few years back [wikipedia.org].
It sounds to me, from reading about the incident, that the locked door was less important than the fact that you can't intimidate a planeful of people by threatening them with death aboard a plane anymore. The passengers and crew jumped the hijackers, and that was the end of that. A regular old door that could be opened from the outside with a code would have worked out just the same.
66MB/s of bandwidth required globally .... Bandwidth is apparently between 5 and 7 USD per MB, so about 4c per second.
Is this still true if you're flying over the pacific ocean at 500 miles an hour? Or are you talking about your cable bill?
Are you crazy enough to trust your life to a wetware computer we can't even understand with any real confidence?
No. That's why we're constantly looking for more information about it.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
How about, rather than an always-on camera, one that can be activated by certain flight crew members in the event of an emergency. It might not help if terrorists have already seized a plane, etc, but if somebody catches on before everyone is taken down then at least there will be a visual record of what happened.
Or maybe change the rules so anyone even suspected of mental health issues isn't instantly and automatically forced out of their career...
Two sources saying the same thing? That's a conspiracy!
I bet it was really shot down by a Ukrainian F-35.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
" Should video streams captured inside the plane become a standard part of aviation safety measures?" Hell yes.
Yes - those numbers were for satellite data, but I forgot to reference it (and where I got it). However, I found some costs here - 25GB for $77,826 ($3.11 per MB) - keep in mind they're prepaid, so an airline will get lower costs.
How about yes, but only viewable if there is a crash landing and fatality.
Or maybe change the rules so anyone even suspected of mental health issues isn't instantly and automatically forced out of their career...
I'm all for equal opportunity and right-to-work and all that, but, I really would prefer that the people in control of the thing that lifts me up to 10.000 feet and travels at 500mph is fully certified as "not even a little crazy"
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Only one thing I disagree with - bandwidth costs. The FDR [apparently] records at about 6kB/s (I'm trying to find a source to back that up), so that's 6kB/s per aircraft in satellite data costs. There can be up to 11,000 aircraft flying at any one time, so that totals 66MB/s of bandwidth required globally. I don't believe lack of bandwidth is a factor.
It is if you are transferring that data over a HF link, I mean ostensibly once you are over the pacific or the Atlantic you could switch to communicating over satellite, but in all likelihood, most aviation radio for OTH transmissions are probably HF signals, not sure you have ever tried transferring data over a HF link, but let me put it this way: 9600 bps is considered HIGH speed.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Or just have a senior member of cabin crew step onto the flight deck whenever one of the flight crew steps out so that there's always two people in the cockpit at any given time, and one can open the door if the other is incapacitated.
So to crash the plane, you only need to get the lead flight attendant under your control. They then kill the cp and your good to go. Ground based unlock? Just get leverage on the IT guy to spoof the signal. Video just gives them a chance to do q selfie diatribe. Life is dangerous. accept it.
Are you thick? The flight attendant wouldn't have a key -- it would be a matter of the flight crew having to physically allow him/her in before one of them leaves the flight deck. The only way this would be any less secure than the current arrangements is if the terrorist attack was an inside job, and cabin crew are no more (or less) corruptible than flight crew, as a general rule.
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At least for U.S. commercial transport, there should be 2 each. Most likely one set in the nose and one set in the aft.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
Well that all seems pretty above board - I wonder then, given how hard it often is to retrieve the black boxes - why commercial passenger planes don't stream at least some of their flight data back to a central location somewhere?
Yes, big ships can often be controlled somewhere other than the bridge/wheel house. That would commonly be the engine room.
No aircraft is that big. 'tho if hollywood is to be believed, one can take over a plane from the avionics bay. (one could certainly *crash* one, but actually flying it... not gonna happen. Plus, it's a very tiny space.)
To answer TFP's question, which many seem to be avoiding, I have one word: yes.
The answer should have been 'yes' 15 years ago, when micro-scale video recording became commercially feasible. Nowadays, with almost countless SoC and autonomous micro-controller hardware married to multiple GB (possibly TB) of solid-state storage —all within the size of a deck of playing cards— I would have to say that video monitoring is not only feasible, it's an imperative.
When we get news of a flight disturbance, what do we get to see? That's right, just some blurry, hand held camera-phone footage with muffled audio. Of course, any footage from the cabin is going to be at the discretion of passengers and not the airline corporate, which mitigates any in-cabin monitoring. But perhaps we should think about it a different way.
How many gadgets are out there for our car windscreens, to monitor other drivers? A dozen? A hundred? These essentially represent the solution for any warranted video monitoring. They have long-term (i.e. per-trip) recording functionality, as well as constant-loop recording for capturing the unexpected. These devices are typically the same size that radar-detectors were two decades ago!
Now, does this necessarily mean that we have to see inside the cockpit? No, it doesn't. Take that privacy argument and stow it.
Video monitoring could mean many things, such as the cockpit door exterior. (IMHO, a much more compelling angle when considering hijackings) It could also mean hull-exterior views, which could be quite valuable for take-off/landing mishaps. Rather than rely on modeling to visualize the attitude, speed and point of impact, it could be right there on a screen for you.
In an aviation scenario, we just start with the functionality of the classic black-box device and evolve it to include video, solid-state storage and an automated distress feature that attempts to upload the last 2 minutes of recorded data to satellite. (for extra credit, make a monitoring algorithm that senses flight-path and altitude deviations for real-time alerts and warranted monitoring)
True, there may be limits to the durability, but being able to put such systems in a compact physical space already increases the survivability of such a system. I bet it could even fit inside a contemporary black-box chassis without much effort. It's anybody's guess why there hasn't been any significant retrofit of the classic Flight Data Recorder design, now that technology is more compact and survivable than when the program began in 1967. The current debate over 'deployable' recorder systems just seems silly. With the profits that airlines are making lately, it's horrifying to consider that one's final message to the world would be from 40-year-old tech.
If this Germanwings incident reveals anything, it's that the safeguards for mishaps are still in human hands, including the reporting of essential data. There's no technological solution for suicidal pilots, because experienced pilots know every manual override. (and can wield a roll of duct tape) Let's at least take the next step (looking at you, FAA) and start mining these mishaps for the valuable lessons they could teach to future avionics, international regulation and corporate norms. Put some bloody cameras on that flight!
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Rolls Royce already do this with their engines - if you have the right contract your ground crew will be alerted that there - for example - are too many metallic particles in a gearbox, without the pilots ever knowing. I think it's done because RR have maintenance contracts and catching issues early saves money (and looks good). I'm sure GE and others do the same.
There's probably a myriad of reasons. Building a standard takes some time - manufacturers will probably have their own propriety methods and will want theirs to be the standard as it will cost them less. Systems will have to be certified. Airlines will have to pay for this equipment, plus the time and money to train technicians.
I can see this happening sooner than expected after the disappearance of MH370 and this crash. We're now getting to (or already have arrived at) the stage that the aircraft an becoming more reliable than the aircrew. Don't get me wrong, BA Flight 36 and US-1549 have show that pilots are better than any computer at dealing with unexpected situation.
I didn't think of that in this case, however I've come across this in the past. Internet on Irish Ferries is (was? - it's been a year) via satellite (the provider is in Norway when I did a whois on the public IP) even when within range of land or when docked. I couldn't understand why their AP didn't route depending on whether it was within range of a 3g cell.
Um, ignore that last comment, I completely misread what you said - facepalm.
However, I based the cost on using satellite 100% of the time, and I've realised that actual cost could be 50% (2c per second), and is likely to come down in the future. If you're needing to send 6kB/s per aircraft HF obviously is not the way to go, but it doesn't mean that the bandwidth isn't available.