Should there be cameras in the cockpit of airplanes? Why or Why Not?
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Asking because of Air India 171. Pilots and their unions are objecting to it because of "privacy" reasons. What do you think about it?
What are you working as? No need to answer. Everyone knows for themselves. Now imagine if you're constantly being recorded while on duty, every single critical step you make in your job. Even knowing nobody is gonna watch the footage unless there's an accident.
In my opinion it adds a stress factor, and as someone who had terrible health consequences of growing up under constant stress, I'd most likely refuse to work somewhere, where I'm being recorded.
MentourPilot has outlined some possibilities though. Out of all ideas of applications in the cockpit, probably the best is when the interaction with instruments are recorded, not the entire cockpit. But then I'm not sure how useful that is. Yes, in this particular accident involving AI171 it would be absolutely crucial. But in other accidents? Every accident is different. The FDR already records the state of instruments. It's highly unlikely that in other accidents such a footage would be useful. On the other hand, I find it likely that in other accidents other camera angles would be needed, which aren't recorded.
It's a really tough choice. Yes, safety first, but... pilots are humans too. We should rather do everything we can for them to not have any reason to do anything malicious, no matter if it's accidental or deliberate. Prefer their mental health, their well being, their training, their work-life balance.
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vastly increases the storage requirements
A couple terabytes of SSDs is a trivial expense on a commercial aircraft in 2025.
You wouldn’t want this video stored on traditional SSDs though. You want it stored on media in a black box like the voice & data recorders so that it can survive crashes, fires, etc. Not sure what the costs associated with that would be though…
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You wouldn’t want this video stored on traditional SSDs though. You want it stored on media in a black box like the voice & data recorders so that it can survive crashes, fires, etc. Not sure what the costs associated with that would be though…
Again, negligible
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I don't really see how this is a privacy thing. They're on the job, what's so private about that? Plenty of people are under video surveillance on the job.
That doesn't make it not a privacy thing.
In many countries employers are not allowed to just arbitrarily video surveil you.
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No, because flight recorders already save large amounts of information about what the plane is doing, the pilot inputs, and what is being said audibly. I'd like to understand how a visual that vastly increases the storage requirements would help understand an event.
I think you're probably vastly overestimating how much increasing the storage on a flight recorder would cost.
Even magnetic storage has vastly dropped in price over the years, it's just become less common.
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it would only make blame slightly easier
If anything other than an intentional act by ones of the pilots is to blame, then that's pretty useful. If the switches malfunctioned or there's a way to actuate them accidentally, that's a design flaw in the aircraft.
I get what you're saying, but how many thousands of cycles do you think the 787 has on it for this to be the first time they failed, and for two separate switches to fail seconds apart?
Accident investigators are very good at what they do, and I will be willing to bet they will be able to narrow it down to an actual cause, even without a camera.
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the question is too broad. should cameras be in cockpits? yes.
should video streams of those cameras be available live? no.
should recordings of the cockpit be stored on the blackboxes? yes
should the footage be wiped between each flight? yes.
pilots have far too much on their minds while flying a plane, no reason to allow a micromanaging ego trip of an executive access to their cockpit to provide unhelpful "critiques" for better flights. let the talent do what you hired them for and take appropriate action after the incident with the supplied evidence.
should the footage be wiped between each flight? yes.
Unfortunately that's not how it would work, current FDR data already isn't wiped between flights, and has been used in the past to discipline crew members.
The issue with that is that when the blame game starts, people inherently try to hide stuff rather than admit fault and work towards a solution.
So where do you draw the line? Should everyone always have a camera pointed at them for "safety"?
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Asking because of Air India 171. Pilots and their unions are objecting to it because of "privacy" reasons. What do you think about it?
In cab recording is becoming increasingly common in some industries. For instance, the US trucking industry.
I would argue that the effectiveness depends a lot on the goals and attitude behind it. If the goal is to penalize the operator (driver/pilot/engineer/etc.) for every single infraction then it's just a huge waste of money. If the goal is to retain the best operators and help build a culture of safety then I can potentially see some value there.
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Ohhhhhhh buddy you activated my trap card. I happen to have multiple type ratings, and I still consider myself far from an expert. However I do still hold a CFI so I'm going to try to teach you some stuff!
Every airplane that I've been required to have a type rating for has a radar altimeter. A lot of systems already use that information, from auto landings, to caution message inhibits, down to GLD spoilers. Watch any "landing an airliner" YouTube videos, I feel pretty safe in saying generally you will hear an audible "50, 40, 30, 20, 10", that information is usually derived from the radar altimeter.
While you are correct, there are emergency checklists that do require engine shutdowns, there are very few that would require that to be done weight off wheels and under 1000ft AGL. Off the top of my head, the ditching (landing in water) checklist would, but that could be tied to a ditching switch, if equipped, which since I don't have a 787 type, I don't know if it does, but I would guess it probably does.
Seeing as you know what a pitot tube is I'm going to assume you at least have some interest in flying. The pitot tube is used for airspeed, what you're probably thinking of is the other part of that system called the static port. That's used for things like altitude and vertical speed.
Circling back to my "simple fix", my current airframe has triple redundant hydraulics with dual redundant pumps for each. So for something that has that much redundancy, don't you think something as critical as an engine should require more than one switch to shutdown, at least at an altitude of high vulnerability? Just food for thought.
Lmao didn’t know we were playing yugioh, but I will defer to the CFI over my checks credentials former student pilot knowledge.
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should the footage be wiped between each flight? yes.
Unfortunately that's not how it would work, current FDR data already isn't wiped between flights, and has been used in the past to discipline crew members.
The issue with that is that when the blame game starts, people inherently try to hide stuff rather than admit fault and work towards a solution.
So where do you draw the line? Should everyone always have a camera pointed at them for "safety"?
I think I was pretty clear on where I draw the line.
thank god I'm not the FAA, right?
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In cab recording is becoming increasingly common in some industries. For instance, the US trucking industry.
I would argue that the effectiveness depends a lot on the goals and attitude behind it. If the goal is to penalize the operator (driver/pilot/engineer/etc.) for every single infraction then it's just a huge waste of money. If the goal is to retain the best operators and help build a culture of safety then I can potentially see some value there.
retain best operators
That is pretty much the exact same attitude that will make people hate it and try to cheat and what not.
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I think I was pretty clear on where I draw the line.
thank god I'm not the FAA, right?
I don't know... You sure seem to have the personality for it!
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Asking because of Air India 171. Pilots and their unions are objecting to it because of "privacy" reasons. What do you think about it?
Does it matter which pilot flipped the switch though? The switches got flipped, maybe intentionally, maybe by accident. They already know when they got flipped, and have the audio of what they were doing at the time. So they can probably figure if it was possibly related to a procedure in progress. That's about all they need. At best you might get evidence that it was intentional, which won't save any lives, and will likely make people feel even worse.
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You wouldn’t want this video stored on traditional SSDs though. You want it stored on media in a black box like the voice & data recorders so that it can survive crashes, fires, etc. Not sure what the costs associated with that would be though…
I'll leave the implementation details to the experts, but I'm sure there is a suitable option for storing 24 hours of video that adds only a negligible amount to the cost of a quarter-billion dollar airplane like the 787.
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I get what you're saying, but how many thousands of cycles do you think the 787 has on it for this to be the first time they failed, and for two separate switches to fail seconds apart?
Accident investigators are very good at what they do, and I will be willing to bet they will be able to narrow it down to an actual cause, even without a camera.
I'll wait for those very good accident investigators to release a conclusion before I speculate too much about how it happened. Maybe they'll have a conclusive answer based on other evidence, but if they don't, it's easy to imagine how a video could have helped.
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I don't really see how this is a privacy thing. They're on the job, what's so private about that? Plenty of people are under video surveillance on the job.
Plenty of people are under video surveillance on the job.
I hear plenty of people get shot in America every day (on average, it's more than one mass shooting a day). By your logic, it should then be legal, as it's a bad thing happening to plenty of people.
Video surveillance at work is wrong for the same reasons open-plan offices are sexist.
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I think I was pretty clear on where I draw the line.
thank god I'm not the FAA, right?
I think I was pretty clear on where I draw the line.
That's the joke: You weren't. You listed some examples that show you've set an arbitrary line, but you weren't clear on where it was.
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vastly increases the storage requirements
A couple terabytes of SSDs is a trivial expense on a commercial aircraft in 2025.
vastly increases the storage requirements
A couple terabytes of SSDs is a trivial expense on a commercial aircraft in 2025.
I hear a similar argument daily -- that the consumer no-RAID stuff is so cheap and thus storage should be cheap. The stuff you get on the shelf isn't valuable here as it wouldn't survive a crash. The consumer stuff would die quickly just from the brutal power-blips the system undergoes just as part of regular flight operations and power-source switching.
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Does it matter which pilot flipped the switch though? The switches got flipped, maybe intentionally, maybe by accident. They already know when they got flipped, and have the audio of what they were doing at the time. So they can probably figure if it was possibly related to a procedure in progress. That's about all they need. At best you might get evidence that it was intentional, which won't save any lives, and will likely make people feel even worse.
Yes, because if you can figure out which part of the procedure broke down leading to that switch being flipped, you can figure out ways to prevent that from happening again. That's much harder to do with just audio.
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vastly increases the storage requirements
A couple terabytes of SSDs is a trivial expense on a commercial aircraft in 2025.
I hear a similar argument daily -- that the consumer no-RAID stuff is so cheap and thus storage should be cheap. The stuff you get on the shelf isn't valuable here as it wouldn't survive a crash. The consumer stuff would die quickly just from the brutal power-blips the system undergoes just as part of regular flight operations and power-source switching.
It could cost a hundred times as much and we're still only in the fifth digit of the airplane's nine-digit price tag.
