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
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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