I’ve never understood this – I figured it must be because of pilot unions or something along the lines. It’s archaic that we physically search for black boxes rather than have it streamed. And to that point, why not have it video recorded as well? It’s a common practice across many professions – how there can be any justification against it?
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This would *decrease* airplane safety.
The cockpit crew needs to be able to talk freely and truthfully with each other, including asking questions like “you seem drowsy, are you OK?” and “you forgot to push that button” and “my arm is feeling a bit numb from too much tennis yesterday. Please take over”.
The black-box recorders now in use are difficult to replay. The airline can’t just decide to pull one out to check if the pilots are following procedure perfectly.
The pilots are OK with the idea that everything they said on the last few flights gets recorded *but then erased.* If there’s an accident or incident, then sure the FAA can pull the recordings and here the copilot say “you forgot to push that button”. They’re ok with that because there actually *was* an accident. They *want* those recordings to happen, so they can prove that nothing they did was the cause of the accident.
But if *every* statement made in the cockpit can get saved forever the pilots would basically start faking parts of the conversations, because that pilot might get fired the next day for forgetting one trivial step in a 1000-step procedure. So instead the co-pilot keeps his mouth shut and pushes the button himself. But that was the wrong thing to do because the pilot simultaneously pushed a different button. Or the copilot waves frantically at the pilot and points at the button, but that distracts the pilot and delays pushing the button.
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