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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.
A compromise would be to record it on a 15 minutes circular buffer. No privacy issue, except in case of crash.
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.
While I agree a video would be useful in some cases I do agree with pilots there needs to be a balance between having information in a crash and creating a permeant record of what happens in the cockpit. Something similar to the flight data recorder where data is overwritten on a periodic basis might be a good compromise. Even so, a video record probably won't add that much information since things such as switch positions, throttle settings, instrument readings etc are already being recorded. Unless something unusual happened, such as with Germanwings, you'll basically just have a video record of who did what your audio and telemetry already says. One question is the cost worth it? Adding a few pounds of weight costs a lot of money over the life of a plane and that also needs to be factored into the equation as well.
As for preventing the Germanwings crash, how would technology such as a streaming videocamera prevent that? The pilot clearly trusted the copilot enough to leave the cockpit so all you have that that point is a video of what is going on but no way to prevent it. The type of technology that might have prevented it, an electronic medical record with automatic notification of employers when a doctor prescribes something that may indicate a lack of fitness for duty or deems a patient unfit for duty might have worked; but that would add its own set of problems nit the least of which is people would stop seeking treatment for conditions that they think could cost them their job.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.