Why the Final Moments Inside a Cockpit Are Heard But Not Seen 447
jones_supa writes: There's no video footage from inside the cockpit of the Germanwings flight that left 150 people dead — nor is such footage recorded from any other commercial airline crash in recent years. Unlike many other vehicles operating with heightened safety concerns, airline cockpits don't come with video surveillance. The reason, in part, is that airline pilots and their unions have argued vigorously against what they see as an invasion of privacy that would not improve aviation safety. The long debate on whether airplane cockpits in the U.S. should be equipped with cameras dates back at least 15 years, when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) first pushed regulators to require video monitoring following what the agency called "several accidents involving a lack of information regarding crewmember actions and the flight deck environment." The latest NTSB recommendation for a cockpit image system (PDF) came in January 2015. Should video streams captured inside the plane become a standard part of aviation safety measures?
And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean that the pilot rendered the co-pilot unconscious, re-set the height on the autopilot, then theatrically knocked on the door to make it sound like he was locked out?
Oh right.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently the pilot is a master at voices.
Even if that half-assed attempt was true, it doesn't improve the safety - they'd still all be dead. It just gives us the ability to ogle and lay blame.
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Apparently the pilot is a master at voices.
Really? Wow.
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Apparently the pilot is a master at voices.
Even if that half-assed attempt was true, it doesn't improve the safety - they'd still all be dead. It just gives us the ability to ogle and lay blame.
Welcome to earth, you must be new here.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently the pilot is a master at voices.
Even if that half-assed attempt was true, it doesn't improve the safety - they'd still all be dead. It just gives us the ability to ogle and lay blame.
Root cause analysis is not just about laying blame, it's about finding out where the processes/procedures broke down and how they can be improved to prevent a similar incident in the future.
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Root cause analysis is not just about laying blame, it's about finding out where the processes/procedures broke down and how they can be improved to prevent a similar incident in the future.
Sure, but this is not a case where video would help that in any way. A captain's privy on the right side of the cockpit door would have helped, but not a camera.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is a fundamentally stupid idea.
Fuck the pilot's union.
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Seriously, what are they doing in the cockpit that needs privacy? Privacy is for when you're retiring for the night with your spouse, not flying an airline full of people.
Can't wait to go board a plane where the pilots do god knows what up front that needs privacy. Very reassuring.
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In Europe workers do have a certain expectation of privacy at work. For example, your employer can't read your private emails even if you use a company computer to access them at lunch time.
Exactly where you draw the line isn't entirely clear. I'd have thought that an aircraft's cockpit would be a reasonable place to put a camera. I imagine the main objection from the union is that the airline will be looking over their shoulders the whole time, which could be dealt with by making it a rule that the recordi
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:4, Informative)
They're still opposed.
But they can be persuaded, for a few bucks.
You may not realize it, but pilots are in general some of the worst paid people given the responsibility - it's very possible the public transit bus driver earns more than the pilot!
In a regional airline, salaries are barely above minimum wage - $20,000/year is not unusual for someone "starting out" - after spending $50k+ on their own training (including the necessary hours to even get the right licenses - airlines don't pay for the ATPL). Even top end captain is rarely much above $60K, and most want to hop onto the heavies before that because you start at the very bottom again with the shit routes, shit times, and shit pay.
Oh yeah, you may also have to "commute" which can easily kill an entire day just flying standby from your home to where you're supposed to start your route. It's only the past few years that the FAA and other bodies have started including commuting time as part of the duty day calculation (notably because more than a few accidents have been caused by pilots basically only getting 1 hour of sleep the past 24). It's still unpaid, though, just like you don't get paid driving from your house to the office.
Once you have your 20 years, you probably have enough seniority to get 6 figure salaries ($130K or so) and left seat captain time as well as the ability to pick the nicer routes.
I can bet you the unions will use video cameras as a bargaining ticket to bring raises all around from "barely able to live" to at least livable.
And yes, more than a few people who earned big bucks have considered a career in flying - the basic rule is if you can cut back your standard of living significantly (you're basically going from a high pay to barely nothing), or have a spouse that earns enough to pay the bills for the first 5 years or so, it's potentially doable. But if you're going to miss the money or such, it's not worth it because pilots are really low-paid professionals.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:4, Insightful)
How is who murdered 150+ people irrelevant?
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: And what good would it do? (Score:4, Informative)
Aircraft have two blackboxes: the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR). The former records audio in the cockpit and the latter records data from various instruments and controls. In this case, they have found the CVR but not the FDR.
cameras for everyone! (Score:5, Interesting)
we should also put camera's on computer programers to see if they are slacking off or picking their noses.
Camera camera camera. the benefits of surveilance are not a sufficient reason to overcome the pervasive invasiveness. pychologically were a private species.
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pychologically were a private species.
Except of course when we lie helpless on the operating table, or aboard a jumble jet being flown into the Alps.
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there should be no expectation of privacy for the pilot when he is at work piloting a plane with people in it.
if they were smart, they'd propose to record flights and wipe the video unless something of consequence is detected in the flight logs or voice coms, etc. hard to argue against that unless you have something to hide.
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Privacy is in the bedroom, not in the cockpit.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:4, Insightful)
And if we could all watch that in an endless loop on CNN, it would tell us what useful information? We already know that the co-pilot went nutzy-cuckoo and deliberately crashed the plane. We already know he took the pilot out of the picture to do it.
So surely the answer is to amp up the psychological stress a few more notches because we all know that high stress makes people more likely to go nutzy-cuckoo and that.... HEY, perhaps we shouldn't do that.
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On the audio recording there's dialog of the captain saying he needed to use the bathroom, the co-pilot telling him that he can leave, and the captain asking the co-pilot to take control. Later, when he's locked out, he identifies himself. Also, from the breathing noises they can tell which of the two headsets was still in use. Unless you believe the prosecutor is lying, there's no confusion as to who left and who stayed.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
The last thing you would have seen on the Germanwings video, would have been a piece of black tape being pasted over the camera lens.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
That would tell you quite a bit about the cause.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but you haven't understood at all how a suicidal person thinks (and they are not "wackos"). When someone has decided to kill themselves, they are not going to be deterred by the thought they could get in trouble
But there's another kind of suicidal person, the person who is angry at suffering harm from either the abuse or the ignorance of others. They are much harder to reason with. This kind of suicidal person is angry at other people and wants to punish them back (even indirectly by harming e.g. their businesses etc.. or even harm the wider society around them). (You see this for example with Spree Killers). If they want to kill themselves, but are also intent on harming or even killing others as well, then they are also showing great anger at others and so if you can't talk them out of it, they have to be physically stopped to save others, but there are even times that being stopped is what the suicidal person wants. Its what cops call, "Suicide by cop" or "death my cop".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
This is when the suicidal person wants the cops to kill them to end what they feel is their suffering. They need help but its hard to help someone so angry at others. This guy sounds very much like this angry at others latter kind but was determined not to let others stop him.
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Want to prevent someone from trying to commit suicide?
Do things that increase the chances of survival/failure. It is the one thing we are afraid of when trying to commit suicide, that we might survive the attempt. It is the one thing that stopped me. What if I survive this?
The video camera might help with that, by alerting ground controllers that something is wrong and taking over the plane remotely, unlocking the door, whatever.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, but you haven't understood at all how a suicidal person thinks. To me, what you said is just the regular wishful thinking bullshit from people who view themselves as superior white knights who can save the world.
I'll talk about myself. I've been suicidal for almost all my life. Some days, the idea to use a cutter to cut my carotids was like the idea to scratch an itch. It was just something natural I could do without thinking. I was not angry at myself, I was not angry at others, it's just that I didn't want to live another day. There were days when my first thought when I woke up was : "Shit, I have to suffer another day".
As a matter of fact, I still wish to die. The reason I don't kill myself is I don't want to hurt other people. My family and a few people who like me would sincerely be sadden with my death. Worse, some of them would feel guilt. I don't want that. I also have three cats and they need me. I can't abandon them. So I accept to suffer for those I love because my own suffering is less important than the suffering my death would cause. It's just a mathematical thing.
Can someone help me? No. The idea is even insulting. I certainly spent far more time thinking about life than you or anyone who would want to "help" me. You have nothing to teach me. So just shut the fuck up, you pretentious little twat.
Yes, there are people who are using suicide as a way to manipulate. Yes, there are people who are just fed up with humanity and who are ready to die just to get their revenge. Those you can "help" by giving them the attention they want, but I don't think that's the majority of people who are "truly" suicidal.
Since I'm in the autism spectrum you could say my case is a bit different, but from my experience I'd say the emotion is more or less the same for everyone. And that's what you don't seem to understand : being suicidal is an emotion and reason has nothing to do with it. It's like joy, sadness or love. You can't reason an emotion, no matter how hard you try. The best you can do is to manipulate... and that's not a nice thing to do.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Interesting)
You think I can't understand, you're wrong, I'm describing myself. I've lost count of the number of times I've thought about killing myself. Looking back I've now struggled with depression for over 35 years. The difference between us is less than you realise. Perhaps the only real difference that matters is that I've started to notice (and you need to notice) how we can deny it to even ourselves which has stopped us seeking enough help.
You're strong enough without ever realising it to not even really be afriad of even your own death, so is asking for help really beyond you?
The fact is the best psychologists have heard it all so many times before, nothing you say to them can really shock them any more and they can help you. At the very least they can give you an independent viewpoint to help you see and compare your thoughts with and so help you find a better way forward. And anyway, knowledge is power. The more you learn the more it can help you in all sorts of ways. You just have to take the next step to ask for help. The one's who deny its needed, (and will tell others that) are really trying to convince and deny it to themselves that its needed. Its all part of the denial. So many ways to deny it, but once you cut through the denial and realise you already have the strength to find help, it really can help you.
Plus as you say, as you are someone on the autism spectrum, (that's something else we have in common) that means you've got the capacity and interest to study subjects in great detail. That's a strength, not a weakness. Also being different from most (not all) but most other people isn't wrong, even though you're heard it is wrong, so many times you can't even count it how many times you've been put down for standing out from the crowd. We are pack animals, we want to fit in and the one's who want to be the pack leaders, don't like it when we don't follow what they want the pack to do. They also don't like it when we speak about our interests, because then they are not the centre of attention. Like I say, knowledge really is power because the more you learn about psychology the more you'll see all sorts of behaviours from others, some of which from others that have caused you great harm in your life. (For example, the one's who want attention, want to be different, so they can stand out and don't like you naturally standing out from the pack. The irony is they want what you've always had. Remember that the next time some tries to put you down for standing out through no fault of your own). This is just a small glimpse of what psychology can show you and many will try to deny it, because they fear, hide or simply deny it for so many reasons. Learn to see the reasons and its amazing what it'll show you over time. You can get help and it will really help you.
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Well, that's basically what flying is. If you're dumb enough to do that, you deserve to crash in a pile of smouldering flames.
That's some major league victim blaming there. Let's see if we can blame the victims of the Titanic for "letting someone stick them in a big tub of riveted metal and setting them afloat on the world's second largest ocean". Or maybe we can blame the dinosaurs for being stupid enough to live on a big rock with only one inadeuately small moon to help protect it from once-in-a-gazillion-years meteor strikes. Stupid dinosaurs -- they really had it coming.
Re:Fuck flying (Score:5, Funny)
Are you crazy enough to trust your life to a wetware computer we can't even understand with any real confidence? There are 100,000 miles of blood vessels in your body, and if just the wrong one clots up, it's over for you. Many important components have no redundancy. Fatal malfunctions regularly occur with no way to repair them. Worst of all, you don't even have an offsite backup system for your most critical data.
That's basically what your body is. If you're dumb enough to rely on an organic life-support system designed through random trial and error, you deserve to die in a messy pile of organic failure.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:4, Insightful)
If this guy was suffering from depression, no background checks or security measures would have filtered him out. Depression is a civilisation disease, caused by the fucked-up society we have created around ourselves, the non-stop pressure, the endless competition, the constant message that you're not good enough that everyone is sending to everyone else. The artificial fear for survival that our governments create to drive wages down and create the economic pressure that corporations than exploit to get people to work under conditions that our parents would've scoffed at.
The solution is not in more pressure, the solution is in making a society that is made for human beings, not for robots, stock markets, the goddess of economic growth or any of the other crazy things that we're sacrificing millions of lives to.
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The data recorder would have corroborated everything but of course, that's damaged with its data card missing.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of the black boxes is not to convince people who don't want to believe. The purpose is mainly to increase future safety. That can be done whether you believe or not.
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The purpose of the black boxes is not to convince people who don't want to believe. The purpose is mainly to increase future safety. That can be done whether you believe or not.
The purpose is to find out what happened and concentrate on that, as opposed to character assassinating a pilot with no evidence whatsoever. Major revelation to grasp that, I know.
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We are finding out what happened. And it's the pilot that has assassinated his own character, as well as his passengers.
....and belief has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Sure it has. Plenty of evidence has been shown. You choose not to believe it.
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Sure it has.
What I 'believe' caused a crash means nothing. The evidence for what happened, is.
Plenty of evidence has been shown.
There is no evidence whatsoever. A French prosecutor who isn't an air crash investigator has given us a version of events that he believes happened on a recording we have never heard. What's followed is a character assassination of a pilot and a ransacking of his home rather than what happened leading up to the crash. That's all. You have a funny idea as to what constitutes evidence, but that doesn't seem to be unusual these d
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A French prosecutor who isn't an air crash investigator has given us a version of events that he believes happened on a recording we have never heard
So you don't believe the prosecutor ?
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You mean the guy who has no background at all in air crash investigation who has interpreted what he think he heard on a recording no one else has ever heard
Why do you believe the prosecutor was the first and only person to have listened to the recordings ?
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nothing official to detail what's happening as you would normally get...
Normally you wouldn't get anything official either, in the days after the crash. These investigations usually takes weeks-months, sometimes even years before the official report comes out. Of course, if they had kept quiet for months, and then came out with the voice recorder tapes, people like you would have cried conspiracy because it took so long.
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He's the only one making conclusions from it though.
No, he's the only one talking to the press about what the conclusions are. Which is pretty typical.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. A team of investigators have had full access to the black box since it was retrieved. This is standard protocol in Europe, where they have mandatory flight safety programs in place for all commercial aviation and very clear protocols in the case of a catastrophic incident (yes, that's an actual class of incident, not emotive language).
The prosecutor is parroting back what has been written in reports and given to him. He won't even have access to the original recording without supervision.
Your grounds for being skeptical should come from the fact that the investigation is ongoing, not this kind of straw man.
Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
The prosecutor has made an utterly baseless interpretation of an audio recording that has never been released and has no corroborating evidence.
There is corroborating evidence. There's testimony from his ex, there's the torn up doctor's notes, there's data from ground control that indicate that the flight control system was set for a descent to 96 feet while flying over the Alps, attempts from the Marseille ground control to contact the pilot, and there's radar data tracking the plane until just before the crash.
Combine that with the data on the voice recorder, and try to come up with an alternative narrative that fits all of this.
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How do you even know there was a plane crash at all? Maybe the whole thing was made up? Maybe there was a crash but there were survivors but they were taken hostage. Maybe it was blown up by an American drone? Maybe the plane that crashed was a decoy and the real flight was diverted and landed in Egypt somewhere to join company with the plane missing from Malaysia? Who is on the ground doing the investigation? Can they be trusted? How do you really know what is there in the rubble? Was that recover
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Re:And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
it would have shown it faster and in more definite fashion.
think about it. 10 small(or just light, space isn't an issue so much as weight) boxes that save the stream, have the memory on robust enough media(flash). the boxes would need to weight a kilo each to be quite robust.
no invasion of privacy either if there is no accident, so whats the big deal? you would think pilots wanted it too, to clear them from pilot error claims.
but it's not really just about this flight either, just that the black box system is pretty antiquated - and in many other cases a video could have shed more light to the cockpit actions which caused the crash or caused the pilots to not be able to recover from equipment failure.
Re: And what good would it do? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand that people who know nothing about flying think video is some miracle or something, but the data recorder shows exactly what the controls are set at. Quick: look at the thrust lever. What percentage of max thrust is it set at? You have to guess with video. The data recorder will tell you exactly.
Why exactly are data recorders antiquated? I mean the concept, not a specific device. This notion that everything should be recorded all the time is idiotic.
Pilots hate this idea because it will show they are human. They make jokes, complain about work, talk about their weekends, etc. Have an incident and armchair idiots will be putting over every last everything trying to find something to blame it on. Oh, the captain discussed his favorite beer, he must have a drinking problem! Quick: let's go through his entire background until we find someone who one time saw him drunk at a football game and interview that person all week.
This is why pilots hate this. That and what is to stop their employer from listening in on their conversions? They might be taking about pay, or working conditions, and we have to stop that. The reason data and voice recorders only record a certain period of time started as a technological limitation but pilots insist on it staying that way for good reason. A complete flight needs no record like that. Video idiots of course will want the whole flight recorded, and pilots know this do it had to be stopped. If I have to watch everything I say and comment on every second I'm on duty at my own job, I'm going to be nervous and borderline hostile. That is not what I want my pilot to be.
Look, if it actually increased safety, as the data and voice recorders have done, they would be all for it. But it won't. It will only have unintended consequences. How about letting the people who do the job have a big say in this and stop the armchair lunacy.
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Everything they say is already recorded. Recording audio is arguably much more privacy-invasive than video, so I fail to see how video would be some dramatic chilling effect like you suggest. Yes, all the plane settings are recorded by the black box, but video could give another insight as to *why* the pilots reacted the way they did. If it increases flight safety in the wake of an accident, I think that deserves consideration. I don't want to necessarily alienate the pilots, but I'd like to hear the pr
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We already have a pretty good idea of what happened to the Germanwings flight even with 1 damaged black box.
Indeed. Every day the poor guy has a new condition: he was depressed, had vision problems, was a narcissist, ... So he was also probably deaf, and didn't hear the captain knocking at the door - which he locked by moving the button to the opposite direction, being also dyslexic. This in addition to some orientation problems, making him think he was already at Dusseldorf airport (his internal clock being also broke).
Still photos (Score:5, Interesting)
A compromise could be the use of still photographs. Even with one photo per 10 seconds, it would give you a lot of extra information. As far as privacy, I would feel that the audio capture is a bigger invasion of privacy than a bunch of photographs.
Re:Still photos (Score:5, Funny)
Unless there is a lot of jerking-off or running around in underwear going on, I generally don't see how even video is much of an invasion compared to audio...
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My neither, but if the pilots have strong feelings otherwise, a compromise is better than nothing.
Re:Still photos (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps they are afraid the general public will find out why it is called a "cockpit"?
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According to Sergeant Detritus there are chicken stories at human parties...
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Yeah, a better compromise is removing the pilots. If it's possible to build an autonomous car, building a completely automated plane is a simple exercise in comparison. Run it on cargo for a few years, leave an option for remote control, but frankly, between terrorists, suicidal pilots, drunk pilots and pilots doing the completely wrong thing, it's time to look for a more long term solution.
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They can go on strikes. Many airlines are already in financial dire straits, so they can't really afford too much trouble.
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And some percentage of them will, which makes the available pool of pilots at a given price smaller, resulting in either lower quality or higher prices or both.
SpaceShipTwo (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SpaceShipTwo (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I wouldn't want to be videotaped 24/7 at work.
Spoken like someone who never worked modern retail. You get over it or you work somewhere else.
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This isn't retail.
Oh, with these cheap, low cost, discount fliers today . . . yes, it sure feels like retail!
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Oh, with these cheap, low cost, discount fliers today . . . yes, it sure feels like retail!
Cattle markets are considered wholesale.
We're already recording truck drivers (Score:2)
So why not record pilots? After all, their cargo is much more valuable.
Truckers are considered "Blue Collar"... (Score:3)
, and as such, they are subjected to higher levels of surveillance due to their greater potential for disobedience to their masters.
15 minutes buffer ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:15 minutes buffer ? (Score:4, Interesting)
ATC operators are already being filmed left and right (in addition to voice recorded) when they're at their stations and the footage is archived as well, so why should pilots not be similarly scrutinized is beyond me.
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That's pretty much what happens with the voice and data recorders anyway, although for longer periods. The voice recorder records two hours (at a minimum), which is going to pick the entire runup to pretty much any crash (MH370 possibly being the exception).
Recording video for the same 2 hours seems very sensible to me. It's very easy to misinterpret noises or things people say if you don't have the full context.
I honestly don't understand the objections to video recording when you already have voice record
Because (Score:2)
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Somebody putting duct tape on the lens, just before the crash, would have confirmed it was not an accident. So, the camera would not have been defeated.
Camera is useless (Score:3)
All the sensor data and controls should go into the box; that will tell you what was going on far far more than a blurry video. You could store the state of every single control in detail over time for hours in the space it takes to store a few frames of video. Besides that you could use such information to find patterns in how they handle disaster situations which could be used for education and design... and A.I. Pilot suicides like this are extremely rare... but we want to spend a ton of money so we c
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Ah, I see that you have also worked in aerospace!
The old joke is, "How do you turn a 50 cent screw into a 5 dollar screw? Put it on an airplane!"
Wouldn't really matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone like Andreas Lubitz could have just reached up and stuck something over the camera lens. That's if he even cared about being filmed, which is doubtful. From what we're hearing about his desire for notoriety, he'd have probably loved to have those last moments caught on camera and broadcast around the world.
We're probably going to see a lot of TV news shows and newspapers calling for cameras in cockpits, but it won't be anything to do with safety, it will be because the footage has commercial value to news organisations.
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There are plenty of air crash investigations where they reached a probable conclusion, but only after long and painstaking analysis of audio tapes. Some of these crashes could have reached a much earlier and more definitive conclusion if video was available.
Also, in this case, it would help remove some remaining doubt if you actually see the co-pilot push the door lock switch intentionally, or if he blocks the camera lenses.
Bockpit video (Score:3)
while cockpit video cameras may help determine the cause of some crashes, there are plenty of recent examples where it wouldn't help.
For example if Malaysia airlines had cockpit video, it would not tell us who fired the missile and why. *for the one shot down in the Ukraine) and we don't have any black boxes from the other one (at the bottom of the indian ocean)
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For example if Malaysia airlines had cockpit video, it would not tell us who fired the missile and why
But it could still rule out some other possible explanations, making the missile scenario more likely.
Goal (Score:3)
If there's an actual case for safety, I'll all for it.
But so far the people advocating for it are clearly motivated by voyeurism.
Live data would be more useful (Score:2)
Most large airliners today have some kind of in-flight cell phone/internet access. Apparently the flight recorder data is about 6 kbps, if you want to include the cockpit voice recorder you may double that. You'd immediately know when it goes dark and send out a search&rescue party, it can't get lost or destroyed in a crash, you would have data right away not days and weeks later and you could often deduce the problem long before you find the boxes.
When scores ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'd rather have the audio streamed (Score:3)
In an era where I can purchase trans-atlantic wifi for $15, it seems archaic to me that we still rely on hardened "black boxes" for data retrieval. Why is audio from the flight deck not REQUIRED to be streamed real-time to satellites in orbit for commercial airliners? Yes yes, it won't be 100% reliable blah blah. So what? No one is advocating REMOVING the black box.. there is no reason you can't have both.
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Looks like the memory card on the the black box has been "lost". Is this true? How is it possible if the black box is designed to withstand 3500 g ?
It's not. One being damaged, once in a blue moon. Two, as Oscar Wilde would have put it......
Also, why isn't data streamed to ground stations nowadays? And why black boxes do not float ?
Good question.
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Looks like the memory card on the the black box has been "lost". Is this true? How is it possible if the black box is designed to withstand 3500 g ? Would the data on the memory card contain information on the door status (locked / unlocked / open / closed /...) ?
Also, why isn't data streamed to ground stations nowadays? And why black boxes do not float ?
In short, together with the door design, it all looks like amateuristic design.
1. Door-locked status: Don't know, but you can't record everything -- there are already plenty of channels that are captured that are far more important
2. Streaming to ground: The NTSB has been working with other air safety bodies to make recommendations to do just that. One issue is available bandwidth: there just isn't enough of it available. So the amount of information that can be transmitted would be limited.
3. Floating black boxes: Like the downlink scenario, breakaway recorders that float a
Political Meeting Monitoring Act (Score:2)
I'm for it would be wonderful data to have, going to be pretty dull to have video all of the staff though, and as is stated above the first thing people wil learn is how to block the cameraview.
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Nice try my little Kurt Nonnegut!
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exactly how many plane hijackings have been prevented by locked doors in the last 14 years ?
All of them? None of them?
THE REINFORCEMENT of cockpit doors on most commercial airliners was perhaps the most important change to air travel in the wake of the September 11th attacks. [economist.com]
There's security theater (screening everyone; banning liquids and gels over a certain amount) and prudent security measures. The only thing were really need is to have a metal detector, bomb sniffer and locked cockpit doors to prevent hijacking of aircraft and their use as flying weapons. That will stop most of the terrorist
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Which is the requirement in the US and has become the requirement in many other areas in the wake of this incident.
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would probably help more. exactly how many plane hijackings have been prevented by locked doors in the last 14 years ? that's the problem with security theatre - there's no stepping back until it takes a violent end (e.g. totalitarian society).
One Jet Blue flight was protected by locking the pilot out after he went crazy.
Re:Conditional recording (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps they could video the cockpit (and the fuselage for that matter) and destroy the footage once the plane has safely landed. There could be streaming capability to the ground and if the feed is accessed, the pilots and crew receive a notification. Any unauthorized breach would be detected immediately. In the case of Germanwings, ground control would have been able to see what's going on once they detected the loss of altitude. It stifles me that in 2015, a young troubled copilot can end 150 lives in a way that can easily be prevented with simple technology.
While I agree a video would be useful in some cases I do agree with pilots there needs to be a balance between having information in a crash and creating a permeant record of what happens in the cockpit. Something similar to the flight data recorder where data is overwritten on a periodic basis might be a good compromise. Even so, a video record probably won't add that much information since things such as switch positions, throttle settings, instrument readings etc are already being recorded. Unless something unusual happened, such as with Germanwings, you'll basically just have a video record of who did what your audio and telemetry already says. One question is the cost worth it? Adding a few pounds of weight costs a lot of money over the life of a plane and that also needs to be factored into the equation as well.
As for preventing the Germanwings crash, how would technology such as a streaming videocamera prevent that? The pilot clearly trusted the copilot enough to leave the cockpit so all you have that that point is a video of what is going on but no way to prevent it. The type of technology that might have prevented it, an electronic medical record with automatic notification of employers when a doctor prescribes something that may indicate a lack of fitness for duty or deems a patient unfit for duty might have worked; but that would add its own set of problems nit the least of which is people would stop seeking treatment for conditions that they think could cost them their job.
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Perhaps they could video the cockpit (and the fuselage for that matter) and destroy the footage once the plane has safely landed.
In the case of the FDR and CVR, that already happens, sort of. The devices are only able to handle a finite amount of data, and new data overwrites the old. So eventually you effectively get what you are suggesting by normal operation.
And there is a good reason not to dump the recordings. During an investigation of a crash where wake turbulence was suspected to be the main culprit, the investigators had the FDR of the plane ahead of the accident plane pulled to see just exactly where it was in relation t
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Perhaps they could video the cockpit (and the fuselage for that matter) and destroy the footage once the plane has safely landed. There could be streaming capability to the ground and if the feed is accessed, the pilots and crew receive a notification. Any unauthorized breach would be detected immediately. In the case of Germanwings, ground control would have been able to see what's going on once they detected the loss of altitude. It stifles me that in 2015, a young troubled copilot can end 150 lives in a way that can easily be prevented with simple technology.
How is it any different than a ferry captain or a bus driver? There are many more fatal accidents from both of those occupations and neither has much of any monitoring.
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Aux control rooms are for big ships where the primary has been destroyed by enemy fire, etc.. In an airplane, it would be a second point of vulnerability and an additional source of failure even if there's no attack..
To fix the problem of this particular crash, put a potty in the cabin - not that I'm seriously suggesting it, just a thought to work with.
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