I see a lot of investigations spend years digging through the black box to determine things that would have been obvious if a camera was involved in the cockpit.
In: Technology
Okay…. I need to point out the obvious here. CCTV is closed circuit tv. It would be recorded on the airplane in some form of video recorder which would then have to survive the crash and be found… that would be another black box to go through. Also, there’s really not much that such a system would add to why is already in place. Between the voice recorder and the data recorder, modern systems record when a button or switch is pressed/what state it is in.
In the US, the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), which investigates crashes, has urged the FAA to require cameras for decades. The pilots’ unions, however, have opposed it at every turn, citing privacy and security concerns. The FAA has pretty much parroted the pilots’ unions’ talking points when refusing to require cameras. So the answer is – the objection of pilots being seen as more important than the additional information cameras would provide by the rulemaking authority in the US.
Some airlines do have cameras – there are options on quite a few modern airliners to have a camera in the cabin, in front of the cockpit door, and external cameras (these are more common on bigger and wider aircraft) with a view looking forward from the vertical stabiliser, each wing, and the belly that feed into the cockpit (and the IFE system) so the pilots have better spatial awareness and so they have visibility of some of the key control surfaces if something goes wrong. None of these cameras are actually recording and storing footage, however.
However (in addition to privacy concerns cited by pilots as another comment has pointed out) there’s also the point that the cost:benefit analysis for adding cameras doesn’t really stack up – the vast majority data required for investigators is already being captured, even if it does take a while to trawl through, and video files are very large. A typical black box can store 25 hours of flight data recorder data (which is basically text) and only two hours of audio data. That equates to only a few hundred megabytes of storage space. A video file would eat up all that space within minutes. You could have *extremely* low resolution and bitrate video recording, but that’d still take up a lot of valuable storage space. The other option would be streaming video via satellite to a ground station, bit that also requires a lot of resources and bandwidth, and brings in the risk of hacking since it’s no longer ‘closed circuit,’ and these cameras would be recording sensitive information as well as personal information as defined by most privacy laws.
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One of the reasons is the privacy of the pilots and crew. Another reason is that it can be a distraction.
CCTVs don’t really provide any data that’s useful. It’s typically hard to pick up audio (which is being recorded anyway), and the results of any pilot actions (switches/buttons, throttle position, et cetera) are also already recorded. It would be additional cost and time, for no real additive benefit.
Enough info is recorded but the current black box.
We can get a pretty good picture of what happened. If the black box is recovered.
Adding additional data (knob positions, switches positions) would be great. But video is just not worth it.
ANA in Japan has a CCTV in the belly so passengers can watch as the plane takes off and lands. It was so cool. It was turned off when in flight, unfortunately.
I think it would be helpful to have some external cameras looking at engines, flaps, landing gear, etc. that the flight crew could view in-flight in case of mechanical issues.
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