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
In short, a camera in the cockpit wouldn’t be very useful most of the time. Safety investigations are about preventing the next incident, not figuring out who to blame for the last one. However insurance companies want to know who to blame for obvious reasons, and there is concern that cameras in the cockpit would serve the goals of insurers rather than aviation safety as a whole. Finding fault in a safety system leads to a less safe system as a whole because it incentivizes people to hide their mistakes. You want people to be open and honest about their mistakes and to get that honesty you need to trust them. Pointing cameras at people is telling them you don’t trust them.
I work in the aviation industry and have been conducting safety investigations full time now for about five years. I honestly can think of only a handful of incidents where having a camera in the cockpit would have even been useful. I’d much rather have cameras around airports recording the runways and taxiways from various angles for example.
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