I don’t get the viewer angle. Of course no one but a few sick folks will actively seek it out. But police body cams will show everything short of an actual shooting death on the 5pm news, no problem and yet people still want cops wearing them.

The same arguments could be made. If you’re doing everything right, the video will prove you did it all right. In some cases it could even help the pilots disprove pilot error accusations.

I believe in what other posters have written. You’re on someone else’s dime, time, and ride. Your coworker below wing making $10 an hour is on video unless he’s taking a leak. But the high salary, high responsibility position running the hundred million dollar machine gets the cloak of privacy?


I think using DL1141 as an example is terrible. That was leaked and those pilots deserved every bit of shame they got. Pilots deserve the loss of trust if they crash a plane because they forgot to run some checklists, while being too busy making jokes about what they’ll say on the CVR if they crash.

The calls to ban releasing CVRs after that had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the fact that 2 pilots got held accountable, and their incompetence was too embarrassing to bear.

Francoflier wrote:

ojjunior wrote:

Why are pilots so against it?
Anything to hide?
Trains, buses, ships, subways even cabs have cameras on it pretty much anywhere in the world for years and no one complains.
It is about safety gentlemen, sorry if this offends your valuable privacy, you're not better than any other worker subject to this.

Can you name a safety benefit of having a camera in a cockpit?
Can you think of any accident in recent times that may have been avoided with a camera in the cockpit?

Everything has a cost/benefit ratio. For operators and manufacturers, a camera system is one more expensive thing that has to be designed and maintained. One more thing liable to get an airplane AOG when it breaks. A few more kilos of hardware sucking more of your fuel.
Unless someone can demonstrate a clear safety benefit from having one, all I can think of is making the investigator's job easier and a assuage the morbid curiosity of a bunch of internet armchair enthusiasts.

Another aspect people outside of the profession often fail to grasp is the potential legal implications.
Any safety event in aviation is very quickly followed by an army of lawyers erecting legal walls around all the parties concerned. This is where you'll usually find a billion dollar aircraft manufacturer and their battalion of lawyers going against a billion dollar airline and their platoon of lawyers going against a couple of pilots who will have to scrape whatever few savings they have to find a couple of small firms willing to defend them.
The former 2 will always try to pin the blame on the pilots, they're easy preys.
There is a reason manuals are essentially written by lawyers nowadays. Whatever happened during the safety event, lawyers will always be able to find something among the thousands of pages of ops manuals that the pilots were not compliant with.

A camera, aside from not increasing safety since there is nothing it can do to prevent an accident (unless you assume pilots would somehow fly safer with a camera pointed at them), will only give more fodder to lawyers.
Not to mention that it's bad enough that the crew's last words essentially end up in the open for all to listen to, I can't imagine having the footage of their last moments alive be freely distributed online for all those sick enthusiasts of macabre content to watch, since there will essentially be no way to ensure the tape isn't leaked. Great for the families...

I have had an opportunity to work in different fields and that has give me a tonne of exposure that I otherwise would never have had I stayed in biochem alone which is what I went to campus to study.

I once worked for this financial institution and they had this fantastic in house software solution that tracked everything you did on it, but they also had cameras simply because they needed to better understand what was going on in the back office environment. It had a lot of benefits from seeing who and where time was being wasted, and by extension it came in handy when it came to some fraud investigation events, or in one case someone went to the bathrooms, smoked and set off the smoke detection system.......the entire building had to be cleared.

Those camera systems were not put there for the benefit of the employees.

I went into research and one of out clients was this large airline catering group and because we were there for a week each six months we got talking about some of the things they do to have a sanitary work environment, why they test for alcohol levels when people come in and when they leave, and a few other things I ought not reveal. A lot of those measures were there to help the company be efficient or to absolve them from liability; in one case, there was a drunk employee that fell off a catering truck to his death as he staggered off the platform.

We also see improvement in tech elsewhere. Body cams are not there for the benefit of the police, they are there for the benefit of the public. The safety systems on planes, the black box, are not there for the benefit of airlines, pilots or even OEM's. They are there for investigators and regulators to better understand what happened in an accident and what changes need to be made to aircraft to have a safer operating environment. In this way, tech has been great for the investigative bodies, and even in forensic labs or just general labs, there is a lot that is possible today in such a simple manner than was possible two decades ago.

So who really cares that you are hauling a few extra kilos of equipment? Pilots have managed to turn something that ought to be there for the general public benefit as something that in some way infringes on their privacy. You have no privacy when you are being paid by a company while on company time.
A lot of industries have come to understand this, including aviation but just not in the cockpit.

Companies are not in the business of leaking stuff that might hurt business and people that have nothing to hide generally have no issue being monitored.

Let's see...take charge of our $50million piece of equipment and take the responsibility of 200 lives in your hands. How dare you think that we ought to be able to have a recording of what you're doing while we pay your six figure salary!!! Blasphemy!

LTEN11 wrote:

Why do does the whole system need to be crash proof ? Surely just the ultimate recording and storing device does, just as in the FDR, CVR.

The recorder would take years to design, test, and certify. Then it needs to be installed in such a way that it works in the most degraded state the aircraft can be in.

LTEN11 wrote:

Going back to your example of the Atlas crash, sure the FDR/CVR gave up the evidence to determine what happened, but surely a video recording system would've helped determine the cause much sooner. Analysis of the pilot actions would've been a lot easier. You also said that nothing happened to the type involved after the investigation, but surely a quicker determination of pilot error would have cleared the airframe involved much quicker. The same goes for the reverse, if the pilots had done nothing wrong and it was clear that there were sudden uncommand actions by the airframe, it could've determined that there problems with the aircraft that could've warranted further action, such as a grounding. Whilst the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes are well documented as to why they happened, video evidence of what happened in the cockpit would've helped explain exactly what the crew encountered and what actions they took and these would've been available much quicker than doing it all through the data analysis required for the FDR. A video recording would speed up investigations immensely, especially for pilot error accidents.

No, cameras would not provide that level of fidelity that you are thinking, the data would be inferior to FDR data. At one stage we used to use video of simulator sessions as a debriefing tool, in reality what a camera would capture is nothing like what a human check captain would capture. People think CCTV is like Hollywood portrays in that you can zoom in to an areas and enhance the picture, that simply is not true.

FDR data is very good, we knew with the Altas event, and the two Max crashes what happened as soon as the FDR data was released. The reason behind the Max crashes was not on the aircraft, it was only determined through the senate investigation with the links between Boeing and the FAA and the certification process. The FDR data had already told us it was not pilot related. Mind you I would think some of the pilot haters on this thread were also on those threads blaming the 3rd world pilots almost immediately.

LTEN11 wrote:

As for crew protections from prosecution in foreign countries, why ?

It comes down to the procedural fairness, and what representation and access to information people have to defend themselves.

LTEN11 wrote:

Do you expect special treatment if you're driving a car in another country and cause an accident ?

Not at all, that is why I choose which countries I will drive myself in. If I caused a fatal accident say in China I could face a death penalty, in the US jail. Pilots dont get to choose which countries they fly into, and how that data will be used.

LTEN11 wrote:

than an airline pilot trying to land below mins in fog and crashing ?

But sometimes a pilot will have to land below minima in fog, they don't have unlimited fuel, and cannot just pull over and stop.

acecrackshot wrote:

If you don't think that FAA policy is made with a variety of stake holder input, then you're not exactly an authoritative voice in this matter.

Well said.

acecrackshot wrote:

Finally, for the cost involved, what percentage of accidents within the US currently unsolved, with the massive data currently being collected, would now be solved.

That is the key point, there is no airliner accident in recent history that is unsolved.

Cubsrule wrote:

Does FAA have the authority to promulgate a regulation that says that no video shall be used in an action against a pilot's certificate and that no certificate holder shall use video to take action against an employee?

The FAA and the NTSB only have jurisdiction within the US, even with FAA regulation in place, if an event happens outside of the US it is the local authorities that investigate and control what, if any data is released. Because of the very nature of international trade, aircraft accidents have the potential to become political footballs, only need to look at the shooting down of 777 and 737 to see that in action.

Think of the worst possible case for misuse of the data, rather than the best case use of the data.

FGITD wrote:

I think using DL1141 as an example is terrible. That was leaked and those pilots deserved every bit of shame they got. Pilots deserve the loss of trust if they crash a plane because they forgot to run some checklists, while being too busy making jokes about what they’ll say on the CVR if they crash.

The calls to ban releasing CVRs after that had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the fact that 2 pilots got held accountable, and their incompetence was too embarrassing to bear.

However is actually read the NTSB report you will see the FAA was aware that this was happening within the airline before the crash, so was the airline, the NTSB leveled recommendation against them. Releasing the CVR resulted in the pilots loosing their jobs, and nothing happening to the FAA or the airline despite the NTSB recommendation. All it does is instead of actually addressing the policy level issues that caused the accident, was to find a coinvent scapegoat.

Chemist wrote:

Let's see...take charge of our $50million piece of equipment and take the responsibility of 200 lives in your hands. How dare you think that we ought to be able to have a recording of what you're doing while we pay your six figure salary!!! Blasphemy!

There is already multiple recordings of what is going on the aircraft, everything that is done on the aircraft is already being reviewed though downloads of post flight data and machine learning algorithms. That data is not destroyed, it is kept forever.

The pilots of DL 1141 were not scape goats. They were incompetent. They knew they had to run checklists. They didn't. Pilots are human and they are capable of lying. Just like the Northwest pilots swore up and and down they would never pull the CB for the takeoff configuration warning. A few pilots were honest and told the NTSB the truth.

If pilots are worthy of the respect they insist they are entitled to there is no reason to object to this. Employees in virtually every setting I know of can be recorded without their knowledge. Be professional.

TTailedTiger wrote:

They were incompetent. They knew they had to run checklists. They didn't.

They would ha e a very long history of check flights and other tests saying they were not incompetent.

If they had done the after start flow and didn’t do the checklist the crash would not have happened.

Their mistake was not the checklist, it was not doing the after start flow. A checklist is not read and do, it’s done after procedures are applied.

Again another clear demonstration of how providing the information to the wrong parties has no safety benefit. Releasing the CVR did not stop that, all it did was to give an publicly expeditious conclusion. It did not address the real issue.

Multiple airliners since that accident took off and crashed without flaps set. This has only stopped on modern types after a takeoff configuration warning was installed.

Gremlinzzzz wrote:

Francoflier wrote:

ojjunior wrote:

Why are pilots so against it?
Anything to hide?
Trains, buses, ships, subways even cabs have cameras on it pretty much anywhere in the world for years and no one complains.
It is about safety gentlemen, sorry if this offends your valuable privacy, you're not better than any other worker subject to this.

Can you name a safety benefit of having a camera in a cockpit?
Can you think of any accident in recent times that may have been avoided with a camera in the cockpit?

Everything has a cost/benefit ratio. For operators and manufacturers, a camera system is one more expensive thing that has to be designed and maintained. One more thing liable to get an airplane AOG when it breaks. A few more kilos of hardware sucking more of your fuel.
Unless someone can demonstrate a clear safety benefit from having one, all I can think of is making the investigator's job easier and a assuage the morbid curiosity of a bunch of internet armchair enthusiasts.

Another aspect people outside of the profession often fail to grasp is the potential legal implications.
Any safety event in aviation is very quickly followed by an army of lawyers erecting legal walls around all the parties concerned. This is where you'll usually find a billion dollar aircraft manufacturer and their battalion of lawyers going against a billion dollar airline and their platoon of lawyers going against a couple of pilots who will have to scrape whatever few savings they have to find a couple of small firms willing to defend them.
The former 2 will always try to pin the blame on the pilots, they're easy preys.
There is a reason manuals are essentially written by lawyers nowadays. Whatever happened during the safety event, lawyers will always be able to find something among the thousands of pages of ops manuals that the pilots were not compliant with.

A camera, aside from not increasing safety since there is nothing it can do to prevent an accident (unless you assume pilots would somehow fly safer with a camera pointed at them), will only give more fodder to lawyers.
Not to mention that it's bad enough that the crew's last words essentially end up in the open for all to listen to, I can't imagine having the footage of their last moments alive be freely distributed online for all those sick enthusiasts of macabre content to watch, since there will essentially be no way to ensure the tape isn't leaked. Great for the families...

I have had an opportunity to work in different fields and that has give me a tonne of exposure that I otherwise would never have had I stayed in biochem alone which is what I went to campus to study.

I once worked for this financial institution and they had this fantastic in house software solution that tracked everything you did on it, but they also had cameras simply because they needed to better understand what was going on in the back office environment. It had a lot of benefits from seeing who and where time was being wasted, and by extension it came in handy when it came to some fraud investigation events, or in one case someone went to the bathrooms, smoked and set off the smoke detection system.......the entire building had to be cleared.

Those camera systems were not put there for the benefit of the employees.

I went into research and one of out clients was this large airline catering group and because we were there for a week each six months we got talking about some of the things they do to have a sanitary work environment, why they test for alcohol levels when people come in and when they leave, and a few other things I ought not reveal. A lot of those measures were there to help the company be efficient or to absolve them from liability; in one case, there was a drunk employee that fell off a catering truck to his death as he staggered off the platform.

We also see improvement in tech elsewhere. Body cams are not there for the benefit of the police, they are there for the benefit of the public. The safety systems on planes, the black box, are not there for the benefit of airlines, pilots or even OEM's. They are there for investigators and regulators to better understand what happened in an accident and what changes need to be made to aircraft to have a safer operating environment. In this way, tech has been great for the investigative bodies, and even in forensic labs or just general labs, there is a lot that is possible today in such a simple manner than was possible two decades ago.

So who really cares that you are hauling a few extra kilos of equipment? Pilots have managed to turn something that ought to be there for the general public benefit as something that in some way infringes on their privacy. You have no privacy when you are being paid by a company while on company time.
A lot of industries have come to understand this, including aviation but just not in the cockpit.

Companies are not in the business of leaking stuff that might hurt business and people that have nothing to hide generally have no issue being monitored.

I am not saying camera systems do not have beneficial uses, but unlike you and many here, I am not one who advocates or promotes their generalized use in every workplace and letting corporations literally remove any amount of privacy in the workplace for the sake of enforcing behaviours and exerting more control on their employees alone. Especially since those who decide on the use of these systems on their employees are often those who would rather not subject themselves to such scrutiny.
There is little anyone can do about the generalized destruction of any degree of privacy anyone has anywhere in life nowadays, but I can't see why it should be encouraged either unless it does indeed bring something tangible to the table, and I am not convinced it does in this case, since investigators find the cause of accidents without it. (it's not like they don't have tons of data to analyse already)
Once again, catching and employee stealing or sleeping on the job is one thing, potentially catching graphic footage of a human beings' last moments with no way to prevent it from leaking to the public is another, additionally to the fact that it further exposes those individuals, alive or dead, to uneven and unjust legal liabilities.

Aviation is among the safest form of transport in the world. No pilot comes to work to have an incident or accident. The amount of liability and risk that they are subject to from infringing on even mundane company policies, which they are already constantly monitored on, is already high enough to prevent them from intentionally misbehaving. Not to mention basic self-preservation instinct. Why doesn't the NTSB start by imposing cameras in every personal vehicle to prevent unsafe driving behaviours which cause much more deaths than aviation by an order of magnitude?

Chemist wrote:

Let's see...take charge of our $50million piece of equipment and take the responsibility of 200 lives in your hands. How dare you think that we ought to be able to have a recording of what you're doing while we pay your six figure salary!!! Blasphemy!

I could go on at length about the increasing workloads, liability, instability and stresses that pilots find themselves under while at the same time witnessing their terms and conditions being continually degraded over the last few decades to the point where I believe anybody seriously considering making a career flying nowadays need their head checked, but I'd rather simply state that the 'capricious and vain millionaire airline pilot' is a stereotype that has trouble disappearing from the public's collective mind.

Tangibly, what would a camera in the cockpit bring to you, other that satisfy your need to see these dirty, undeserving pilots being brought down a notch?

zeke wrote:

TTailedTiger wrote:

They were incompetent. They knew they had to run checklists. They didn't.

They would ha e a very long history of check flights and other tests saying they were not incompetent.

If they had done the after start flow and didn’t do the checklist the crash would not have happened.

Their mistake was not the checklist, it was not doing the after start flow. A checklist is not read and do, it’s done after procedures are applied.

Again another clear demonstration of how providing the information to the wrong parties has no safety benefit. Releasing the CVR did not stop that, all it did was to give an publicly expeditious conclusion. It did not address the real issue.

Multiple airliners since that accident took off and crashed without flaps set. This has only stopped on modern types after a takeoff configuration warning was installed.

Had they run the checklist they would have caught their error. Are you disagreeing with that?

zeke wrote:

LTEN11 wrote:

Why do does the whole system need to be crash proof ? Surely just the ultimate recording and storing device does, just as in the FDR, CVR.

The recorder would take years to design, test, and certify. Then it needs to be installed in such a way that it works in the most degraded state the aircraft can be in.

LTEN11 wrote:

Going back to your example of the Atlas crash, sure the FDR/CVR gave up the evidence to determine what happened, but surely a video recording system would've helped determine the cause much sooner. Analysis of the pilot actions would've been a lot easier. You also said that nothing happened to the type involved after the investigation, but surely a quicker determination of pilot error would have cleared the airframe involved much quicker. The same goes for the reverse, if the pilots had done nothing wrong and it was clear that there were sudden uncommand actions by the airframe, it could've determined that there problems with the aircraft that could've warranted further action, such as a grounding. Whilst the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes are well documented as to why they happened, video evidence of what happened in the cockpit would've helped explain exactly what the crew encountered and what actions they took and these would've been available much quicker than doing it all through the data analysis required for the FDR. A video recording would speed up investigations immensely, especially for pilot error accidents.

No, cameras would not provide that level of fidelity that you are thinking, the data would be inferior to FDR data. At one stage we used to use video of simulator sessions as a debriefing tool, in reality what a camera would capture is nothing like what a human check captain would capture. People think CCTV is like Hollywood portrays in that you can zoom in to an areas and enhance the picture, that simply is not true.

FDR data is very good, we knew with the Altas event, and the two Max crashes what happened as soon as the FDR data was released. The reason behind the Max crashes was not on the aircraft, it was only determined through the senate investigation with the links between Boeing and the FAA and the certification process. The FDR data had already told us it was not pilot related. Mind you I would think some of the pilot haters on this thread were also on those threads blaming the 3rd world pilots almost immediately.

LTEN11 wrote:

As for crew protections from prosecution in foreign countries, why ?

It comes down to the procedural fairness, and what representation and access to information people have to defend themselves.

LTEN11 wrote:

Do you expect special treatment if you're driving a car in another country and cause an accident ?

Not at all, that is why I choose which countries I will drive myself in. If I caused a fatal accident say in China I could face a death penalty, in the US jail. Pilots dont get to choose which countries they fly into, and how that data will be used.

LTEN11 wrote:

than an airline pilot trying to land below mins in fog and crashing ?

But sometimes a pilot will have to land below minima in fog, they don't have unlimited fuel, and cannot just pull over and stop.

acecrackshot wrote:

If you don't think that FAA policy is made with a variety of stake holder input, then you're not exactly an authoritative voice in this matter.

Well said.

acecrackshot wrote:

Finally, for the cost involved, what percentage of accidents within the US currently unsolved, with the massive data currently being collected, would now be solved.

That is the key point, there is no airliner accident in recent history that is unsolved.

Cubsrule wrote:

Does FAA have the authority to promulgate a regulation that says that no video shall be used in an action against a pilot's certificate and that no certificate holder shall use video to take action against an employee?

The FAA and the NTSB only have jurisdiction within the US, even with FAA regulation in place, if an event happens outside of the US it is the local authorities that investigate and control what, if any data is released. Because of the very nature of international trade, aircraft accidents have the potential to become political footballs, only need to look at the shooting down of 777 and 737 to see that in action.

Think of the worst possible case for misuse of the data, rather than the best case use of the data.

FGITD wrote:

I think using DL1141 as an example is terrible. That was leaked and those pilots deserved every bit of shame they got. Pilots deserve the loss of trust if they crash a plane because they forgot to run some checklists, while being too busy making jokes about what they’ll say on the CVR if they crash.

The calls to ban releasing CVRs after that had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the fact that 2 pilots got held accountable, and their incompetence was too embarrassing to bear.

However is actually read the NTSB report you will see the FAA was aware that this was happening within the airline before the crash, so was the airline, the NTSB leveled recommendation against them. Releasing the CVR resulted in the pilots loosing their jobs, and nothing happening to the FAA or the airline despite the NTSB recommendation. All it does is instead of actually addressing the policy level issues that caused the accident, was to find a coinvent scapegoat.

Chemist wrote:

Let's see...take charge of our $50million piece of equipment and take the responsibility of 200 lives in your hands. How dare you think that we ought to be able to have a recording of what you're doing while we pay your six figure salary!!! Blasphemy!

There is already multiple recordings of what is going on the aircraft, everything that is done on the aircraft is already being reviewed though downloads of post flight data and machine learning algorithms. That data is not destroyed, it is kept forever.

In no particular order.

1. We have one saying in science and that is 'no data is bad data.'
Any bit of evidence, even that which is observed is good data. Whether it is analyzed well is a question for another day. Employees, especially those who would be doing something wrong are unlikely to ever want something that will catch them off guard.

Talk of how many accidents remain unsolved, and how many would this tool help solve is no different to OEM's applying for exceptions because changing something to a standard that is better might cost money. Where have we heard this before? It is myopic to the extreme.

2. Who does not know that they should not be releasing sensitive information? Pilots ought to know that they are in communication with ATC, and that the airport is a secure facility that will at times deal even with military aircraft. Why should the FAA have to suffer such a people? Why should the airline entertain them either? These are adults doing infant like stuff and just because you have been getting away with it does not mean it is right.

3. The data that is in the CVR, FDR and in future, a cockpit video recorder is not the personal belonging of the pilot for them to determine when and how it is used. So long as it is used for the right purpose, and it is not leaked, where is the issue? It is no different to how this material is being handled by companies elsewhere in various other industries, including airports.

4. On the MAX, the NTSB was interested in understanding what cause the accident. Lawmakers were interested in knowing how the regulatory system that is supposed to ensure that these accidents do not happen, let it happen. The can of worms coming out was normal in what happens in any competent investigation even though Boeing really stonewalled when it came to releasing data.

Francoflier wrote:

I am not saying camera systems do not have beneficial uses, but unlike you and many here, I am not one who advocates or promotes their generalized use in every workplace and letting corporations literally remove any amount of privacy in the workplace for the sake of enforcing behaviours and exerting more control on their employees alone. Especially since those who decide on the use of these systems on their employees are often those who would rather not subject themselves to such scrutiny.
There is little anyone can do about the generalized destruction of any degree of privacy anyone has anywhere in life nowadays, but I can't see why it should be encouraged either unless it does indeed bring something tangible to the table, and I am not convinced it does in this case, since investigators find the cause of accidents without it. (it's not like they don't have tons of data to analyse already)
Once again, catching and employee stealing or sleeping on the job is one thing, potentially catching graphic footage of a human beings' last moments with no way to prevent it from leaking to the public is another, additionally to the fact that it further exposes those individuals, alive or dead, to uneven and unjust legal liabilities.

You have no privacy when you are on someones employ, this is not an erosion of privacy and people need to stop presenting it as such. If you had a company, you would want to know what it is your employees are doing and whether they are productive or not.

There are so many processes that have improved because of increased monitoring and industries have only seen benefits come from it. Today, you have people in surgical rooms whose entire job is to monitor, you have someone whose job it is to pass equipment to the surgeon and note that every tool they started with is on the table before the patient is sown up. It is not an intrusion of the doctor's privacy.

We also behave like people that handle this data will be careless. There is police brutality feed and unless it is caught by a bystander, they will always edit the end sequence to omit victims going down. It is not only the decent thing to do, but it also in some ways helps keep protests at bay.

Science has dealt with qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. Observation is a fantastic qualitative device and it is part of every accident as found in the cockpit voice recorder. The FDR is a great quantitative tool; if we can hear what pilots are saying, we can see what their inputs were, what is the problem in seeing what they were doing while trying to save the flight? If anything, this should be another component that goes into the black box and accessed only in the case of an accident.

Anything else should be treated as noise.

Francoflier wrote:

Aviation is among the safest form of transport in the world. No pilot comes to work to have an incident or accident. The amount of liability and risk that they are subject to from infringing on even mundane company policies, which they are already constantly monitored on, is already high enough to prevent them from intentionally misbehaving. Not to mention basic self-preservation instinct. Why doesn't the NTSB start by imposing cameras in every personal vehicle to prevent unsafe driving behaviours which cause much more deaths than aviation by an order of magnitude?

It does not matter that it is the safest mode of travel, what matters is whether that record can get better. The aim is to get to a point where you have zero accidents, and not to rest on your laurels.

People also need to stop behaving like pilot monitoring is the end of the world. Every single company monitors its processes and checks for quality assurance.

Onto your last point, your personal vehicle is your personal property and your privacy needs to be respected. They are not imposing that because they would not get far. An airline is a public use utility and as such, there is a far greater burden on public use operators to adhere to far greater safety standards. It is far easier to manage regulate mass transit solutions, and it is something that the population has an interest in as opposed to wasting time and money trying to infringe on private citizens rights on their own property.

Gremlinzzzz wrote:

1. We have one saying in science and that is 'no data is bad data.'
Any bit of evidence, even that which is observed is good data. Whether it is analyzed well is a question for another day. Employees, especially those who would be doing something wrong are unlikely to ever want something that will catch them off guard.

That is simply not true, I spent more of my life than I would want to admit pre-processing data. The majority of data that is collected is absolute meaningless rubbish. One of the biggest problems airlines not face is how to store, maintain, and the meaningful analysis data they collect.

Gremlinzzzz wrote:

Talk of how many accidents remain unsolved, and how many would this tool help solve is no different to OEM's applying for exceptions because changing something to a standard that is better might cost money.

There are no unsolved airliner accidents in recent history investigated by the NTSB.

Gremlinzzzz wrote:

Who does not know that they should not be releasing sensitive information? Pilots ought to know that they are in communication with ATC, and that the airport is a secure facility that will at times deal even with military aircraft. Why should the FAA have to suffer such a people? Why should the airline entertain them either? These are adults doing infant like stuff and just because you have been getting away with it does not mean it is right.

Laws are different in different parts if the world, for example the public listening to ATC communications in the UK is illegal. The FAA does not have CCTV covering controllers at their stations, nor do the have the same level of data storage as what airlines do for their aircraft. When an incident happens, the FAA ATC recordings have to be secured rather smartly.

Gremlinzzzz wrote:

The data that is in the CVR, FDR and in future, a cockpit video recorder is not the personal belonging of the pilot for them to determine when and how it is used. So long as it is used for the right purpose, and it is not leaked, where is the issue? It is no different to how this material is being handled by companies elsewhere in various other industries, including airports.

You will find that in most jurisdictions that a cockpit is not deemed to be a public space, nor is it accessible to the public in flight, in fact there are rules in place specially preventing public access in flight. Therefore a reasonable expectation of privacy from the public does exist.

Where I work there is a contact between the employer and employee on the acceptable use of any data collected, that includes data collected from employees, and data collected from customers. The employer can use data collected from the aircraft for furtherment of safety, however it has to be deidentified. When the data is deidentified, what emerges is trends, rather than finger pointing on particular flights. When trends are identified, appropriate policies can be promogulated, and training packages generated. Our deidentified data is generally published quarterly and made available to anyone in safety sensitive roles.

Gremlinzzzz wrote:

On the MAX, the NTSB was interested in understanding what cause the accident.

The NTSB did not directly investigate either MAX accident, they were there as an observer acting as a conduit being the representative of the state of design between the Indonesian and Ethiopian investigators and the OEMs and regulator, the same status engine and airframe OEMs. The problems with the MAX had nothing to do with the crew, it was a clear design issue which was only addressed after a significant grounding. There were many on here including current 737 pilots who blamed the 3rd world pilots for the crashes. It was only until the senate investigation that the unhealthy certification relationship between the OEM and the regulator came to light.

You may or may not recall, there was no video record kept of any of the MCAS certification testing, either in the simulator or aircraft.

zeke wrote:

That is simply not true, I spent more of my life than I would want to admit pre-processing data. The majority of data that is collected is absolute meaningless rubbish. One of the biggest problems airlines not face is how to store, maintain, and the meaningful analysis data they collect.

There is nothing such as meaningless data. All data is something that can be used for something, some of it may not just be relevant to an airline at a certain time, and this is true for all research I have done. Sometimes it is hard to classify a grouping of information and to analyze it until questions become simpler or more nuanced.

zeke wrote:

There are no unsolved airliner accidents in recent history investigated by the NTSB.

The cameras are not there for the benefit of the pilots, and just because there are no unsolved cases does not mean that you cannot become more efficient. Man is meant to learn, and become better at handling tasks, or is supposed to automate to make things more efficient. People in aviation should be conversant with this.

Investigators should not have to work harder just because pilots want to be comfortable in what is already established. As I said, arguably one of the most entitled and spoiled work groups I have come across in my entire life. Everything is about them and not the bigger picture in most situations.

zeke wrote:

Laws are different in different parts if the world, for example the public listening to ATC communications in the UK is illegal. The FAA does not have CCTV covering controllers at their stations, nor do the have the same level of data storage as what airlines do for their aircraft. When an incident happens, the FAA ATC recordings have to be secured rather smartly.

Chewing khat is illegal in a lot of African and Middle East countries and it used to be an export to Europe, but show up to China with a single leaf/stalk of that substance in your bag and you will know Jesus is LORD. Do not do stupid stuff and you will be safe, and as people are told everywhere, ignorance is not an excuse.

zeke wrote:

You will find that in most jurisdictions that a cockpit is not deemed to be a public space, nor is it accessible to the public in flight, in fact there are rules in place specially preventing public access in flight. Therefore a reasonable expectation of privacy from the public does exist.

This is surely a misrepresentation of facts. Authorities do not want anyone other than authorized staff in the cockpit, and this is something that goes all the way back to 9/11. It has nothing to do with pilots perceived privacy and everything to stop loss of human life due to terrorism.

zeke wrote:

Where I work there is a contact between the employer and employee on the acceptable use of any data collected, that includes data collected from employees, and data collected from customers. The employer can use data collected from the aircraft for furtherment of safety, however it has to be deidentified. When the data is deidentified, what emerges is trends, rather than finger pointing on particular flights. When trends are identified, appropriate policies can be promogulated, and training packages generated. Our deidentified data is generally published quarterly and made available to anyone in safety sensitive roles.

This is not strange. In the medical field, we used to use codes for each patient so that if anyone came to the lab, there would be no identifiers strangers could latch onto. If they needed to test a sample, and they knew what they were doing, they would get results but never know who the individual was. In finance, we were told to shred any customer statement that we had printed and were no longer using; even the cleaners were not supposed to view that data.

None of those were for our benefit as employees. They were there to absolve the employer from liability and to safeguard client privacy. There were other data points looked at to see what productivity was for the group and where it needed to get better. Individual employee evaluations were also kept private. All of these are known to anyone in management that want to build a conducive work environment.

zeke wrote:

The NTSB did not directly investigate either MAX accident, they were there as an observer acting as a conduit being the representative of the state of design between the Indonesian and Ethiopian investigators and the OEMs and regulator, the same status engine and airframe OEMs. The problems with the MAX had nothing to do with the crew, it was a clear design issue which was only addressed after a significant grounding. There were many on here including current 737 pilots who blamed the 3rd world pilots for the crashes. It was only until the senate investigation that the unhealthy certification relationship between the OEM and the regulator came to light.

You may or may not recall, there was no video record kept of any of the MCAS certification testing, either in the simulator or aircraft.

I was here at the time and I defended the pilots. If I had my way, that jet would never fly again, and Boeing would be taken to the cleaners in fines. But we live in a world of regulatory capture.

MCAS should have never been certified, no video or with video evidence, and that has no place in the discussion we are having. What we have seen in simulated videos on what would have happened in the Ethiopian Airlines crash from simulators.

Chewing Khat is legal*

TTailedTiger wrote:

Francoflier wrote:

ojjunior wrote:

Why are pilots so against it?
Anything to hide?
Trains, buses, ships, subways even cabs have cameras on it pretty much anywhere in the world for years and no one complains.
It is about safety gentlemen, sorry if this offends your valuable privacy, you're not better than any other worker subject to this.

Can you name a safety benefit of having a camera in a cockpit?
Can you think of any accident in recent times that may have been avoided with a camera in the cockpit?

Everything has a cost/benefit ratio. For operators and manufacturers, a camera system is one more expensive thing that has to be designed and maintained. One more thing liable to get an airplane AOG when it breaks. A few more kilos of hardware sucking more of your fuel.
Unless someone can demonstrate a clear safety benefit from having one, all I can think of is making the investigator's job easier and a assuage the morbid curiosity of a bunch of internet armchair enthusiasts.

Another aspect people outside of the profession often fail to grasp is the potential legal implications.
Any safety event in aviation is very quickly followed by an army of lawyers erecting legal walls around all the parties concerned. This is where you'll usually find a billion dollar aircraft manufacturer and their battalion of lawyers going against a billion dollar airline and their platoon of lawyers going against a couple of pilots who will have to scrape whatever few savings they have to find a couple of small firms willing to defend them.
The former 2 will always try to pin the blame on the pilots, they're easy preys.
There is a reason manuals are essentially written by lawyers nowadays. Whatever happened during the safety event, lawyers will always be able to find something among the thousands of pages of ops manuals that the pilots were not compliant with.

A camera, aside from not increasing safety since there is nothing it can do to prevent an accident (unless you assume pilots would somehow fly safer with a camera pointed at them), will only give more fodder to lawyers.
Not to mention that it's bad enough that the crew's last words essentially end up in the open for all to listen to, I can't imagine having the footage of their last moments alive be freely distributed online for all those sick enthusiasts of macabre content to watch, since there will essentially be no way to ensure the tape isn't leaked. Great for the families...

Why wouldn't you want the investigators job to be easier? The sooner they find the cause the sooner it can be corrected. Whether that be mechanical or human error.

Imagine if Boeing or Airbus demanded their airplanes not be monitored by an FDR...

And what in the world makes you believe the NTSB would upload the crash video for everyone to see?

Ah, because it’s happened before when the promises were that it wouldn’t. The worst part of this idea is lawyers and investigators spending days picking out the absolutely correct answer to a problem the two pilots had seconds to figure out. I’m glad I had my 48 years in before before like this came up. BTW, I run a corporate FDM program as a safety manager. I’m not against tech, but videos aren’t a safety improvement as CVRs were. No accident is unresolved because the plane lacked video.

As to lost planes like MH370, position recording is required now. Constant data uplinks are too bandwidth intensive with current tech.

zeke wrote:

They know exactly what happened to the aircraft, we know why it crashed. The FDR and CVR gave them that information.

Exactly!

I can think of no crash left unsolved where the FDR and CVR were recovered. And ..... a video feed would have solved it.

Today’s modern FDRs have thousands of feeds, right down to switch or lever position. To put such an installation into a school bus or classroom would be cost prohibitive. A cheap alternative? A camera with a recorder.

So you’ll see video recorders in school buses, class rooms and police officer’s chests, not because it’s the best, but because it’s the cheapest!

This is a power thing. Pilots have astounding political power, union power, and protections that few other workers enjoy. Workers need some power to protect against predatory company practices, but I simply don't understand the protections pilots demand that almost no other workers enjoy.

Res privacy. For some reason US libertarians and conservatives in general are opposed to most privacy laws. When companies, banks and governments have details and data it ALL should be protected by relevant privacy regulations. The unauthorized release of data for personal gain or enjoyment that harms or potentially harms another person should result in personal financial responsibility.

CrewBunk wrote:

zeke wrote:

They know exactly what happened to the aircraft, we know why it crashed. The FDR and CVR gave them that information.

Exactly!

I can think of no crash left unsolved where the FDR and CVR were recovered. And ..... a video feed would have solved it.

Today’s modern FDRs have thousands of feeds, right down to switch or lever position. To put such an installation into a school bus or classroom would be cost prohibitive. A cheap alternative? A camera with a recorder.

So you’ll see video recorders in school buses, class rooms and police officer’s chests, not because it’s the best, but because it’s the cheapest!

Why the plane crashed isn’t always the end all be all for improving aircraft safety and training. Pilot actions that are not captured by audio or a FDR can improve safety eg., how focused were they on the instruments vs casually staring off into nothingness before some event occurred. NTSB would ideally like to see where eyes were looking at all times of the crash. Both to better understand why a plane crashed (remember most crashes nowadays have a strong pilot error component- video In conjunction with audio provides better indication of pilot’s actions and mindset) and to provide recommendation for improvements in procedures/cockpit designs.

Chemist wrote:

Let's see...take charge of our $50million piece of equipment and take the responsibility of 200 lives in your hands. How dare you think that we ought to be able to have a recording of what you're doing while we pay your six figure salary!!! Blasphemy!

So you obviously unaware of the various medical, training and procedural/safety systems in place.

Please tell us, specifically to 121 aviation, how these current systems are failing to the point where cameras are needed, and how cameras will fix that.

TTailedTiger wrote:

[

Had they run the checklist they would have caught their error. Are you disagreeing with that?

What is your professional or personal basis for this assessment?

As an airline pilot, I'm very split on this.

1. From a safety point of view, I would agree with it 100% (however)

2. These videos, like CVR recordings may become public, broadcast in the media, or become "entertainment" for the deranged. One only has to look at the insane number of videos regarding automobile accidents that are available on social media sites. The last thing I would want is for the families [of pilots involved in accidents] to see their loved ones' last moments on video.

3. The other "worry" is that companies may use those videos to discipline pilots for valid and not so valid reasons.

In the end, I'd be okay with it if two conditions are met:
1. Videos cannot be made public for any reason whatsoever. If they do, the government agency that is responsible for safeguarding them gets a huge fine and the family of the pilots are generously compensated for the potential psychological and trauma it may cause.

2. Cannot be accessed by anyone but the investigative authorities. (NTSB, TSB, AAIB, BEA, or law enforcement, such as FBI, RCMP, etc.)

Polot wrote:

Why the plane crashed isn’t always the end all be all for improving aircraft safety and training. Pilot actions that are not captured by audio or a FDR can improve safety eg., how focused were they on the instruments vs casually staring off into nothingness before some event occurred. NTSB would ideally like to see where eyes were looking at all times of the crash. Both to better understand why a plane crashed (remember most crashes nowadays have a strong pilot error component- video In conjunction with audio provides better indication of pilot’s actions and mindset) and to provide recommendation for improvements in procedures/cockpit designs.

I would argue this is a somewhat cartoonish view of the how/why of aircraft accidents.

Planes don't crash because pilots become distracted and stare away, and to capture what you're arguing would require multiple cameras.

I could make the argument that as many turbine aircraft hull losses have occurred due to NTSB indifference (for example, Sumwalt's public pronouncement at the 2018 Bombardier Safety Standdown that he had no interest in Part 91 training or operations, before recently pulling a 180 degree on this stance in response to the Hawaii jump plane accident.)

Again, I wonder how many people in this thread really know what FOQA data is capturing routinely, right now.

frmrCapCadet wrote:

This is a power thing. Pilots have astounding political power, union power, and protections that few other workers enjoy. Workers need some power to protect against predatory company practices, but I simply don't understand the protections pilots demand that almost no other workers enjoy.

Res privacy. For some reason US libertarians and conservatives in general are opposed to most privacy laws. When companies, banks and governments have details and data it ALL should be protected by relevant privacy regulations. The unauthorized release of data for personal gain or enjoyment that harms or potentially harms another person should result in personal financial responsibility.

Because we can—no bucks, no Buck Rogers as the old saw went. ELDsin trucking are similar and lots of O/Os do all sorts of work arounds—mostly restoring old trucks and rebuilding old Cat engines.

acecrackshot wrote:

Polot wrote:

Why the plane crashed isn’t always the end all be all for improving aircraft safety and training. Pilot actions that are not captured by audio or a FDR can improve safety eg., how focused were they on the instruments vs casually staring off into nothingness before some event occurred. NTSB would ideally like to see where eyes were looking at all times of the crash. Both to better understand why a plane crashed (remember most crashes nowadays have a strong pilot error component- video In conjunction with audio provides better indication of pilot’s actions and mindset) and to provide recommendation for improvements in procedures/cockpit designs.

I would argue this is a somewhat cartoonish view of the how/why of aircraft accidents.

Planes don't crash because pilots become distracted and stare away, and to capture what you're arguing would require multiple cameras.

I could make the argument that as many turbine aircraft hull losses have occurred due to NTSB indifference (for example, Sumwalt's public pronouncement at the 2018 Bombardier Safety Standdown that he had no interest in Part 91 training or operations, before recently pulling a 180 degree on this stance in response to the Hawaii jump plane accident.)

Again, I wonder how many people in this thread really know what FOQA data is capturing routinely, right now.

I would add the NTSB and FAA indifference to anything other than 121 safety. Bob Sumwalt has been a good friend of Safety Standdown for years, I’ve met him there and at FSF meetings, but to make that pronouncement at that forum shows where the NTSB is.

Read the NTSB report on the DA-50 crash at Greenville—2 unqualified pilots, flying an 134.5 trip and crickets other than plane overran runways, pilots killed.

Varsity1 wrote:

Until it makes it on the internet. Then they're crucified in the court of public opinion.

A camera in the cockpit adds no safety to the people being video'd.

Have CVR leaked that weren't fatal crashes ?

No, no, no. Flight Data Monitoring has shown that management is completely unable to handle this stuff responsibly. This is going to devolve faster than you can imagine into managements slapping the pilots over their wrists for reading the newspaper while in cruise.

GalaxyFlyer wrote:

I could make the argument that as many turbine aircraft hull losses have occurred due to NTSB indifference (for example, Sumwalt's public pronouncement at the 2018
I would add the NTSB and FAA indifference to anything other than 121 safety. Bob Sumwalt has been a good friend of Safety Standdown for years, I’ve met him there and at FSF meetings, but to make that pronouncement at that forum shows where the NTSB is.

Read the NTSB report on the DA-50 crash at Greenville—2 unqualified pilots, flying an 134.5 trip and crickets other than plane overran runways, pilots killed.

If there is a place with plenty of safety system work to be done, it’s the 135/134.5/91/90.5 world. Crew duty day, safety analysis, FOQA, ASAP, etc.

In the tepid defense of Sumwalt, basically he said that the Part 91/61/141 turbine training world wasn’t the NTSB wheelhouse and he felt they had limited tools to bear.

Now, for 135 training, esp. outsourced/vendor training, I think there is lots the NTSB could do.

The 135 world alone has tremendous variance; there are Part 135 and 91 flight departments better than any head-of-state squadron on the planet, and ones I wouldn’t put a POW on, and for even an educated consumer no way to tell how in compliance Joe’s Butchery Academy and Flight Service in Frog Stump, Missouri really is. Just push the “I believe” button when your broker provided aircraft appears.

SWADawg wrote:

Will said video be used for disciplinary action against a crew outside of an accident? Too many questions and not enough evidence to show that video wouldn’t be used to discipline crews for something based on video that was taken while at cruise altitude for example.

Yep, and so the question is what are they doing/possibly doing that they don't want known. Why should they be immune to something at cruise altitude, but not on the ground?

VSMUT wrote:

No, no, no. Flight Data Monitoring has shown that management is completely unable to handle this stuff responsibly. This is going to devolve faster than you can imagine into managements slapping the pilots over their wrists for reading the newspaper while in cruise.

So the you are calling for removal of CVRs from the cockpit as well?

Chemist wrote:

VSMUT wrote:

No, no, no. Flight Data Monitoring has shown that management is completely unable to handle this stuff responsibly. This is going to devolve faster than you can imagine into managements slapping the pilots over their wrists for reading the newspaper while in cruise.

So the you are calling for removal of CVRs from the cockpit as well?

Flight data monitoring is through FOQA, or Flight Operational Quality Assurance. CVR/FDR data is stored in the module and not pulled unless an incident/accident warrants the airline to do so.

FOQA can easily be obtained via Satellite Datalink (such as engine monitoring programs) or chips onboard (such as Airbus QARs). FOQA is required under ICAO Annex 6. It was designed to improve flight safety by identifying trends etc., but some carriers, such as the one I used to be employed at, have instead used it to discipline pilots or evaluate pilots. Such a program is what VSMUT is referring to; it was sold as a safety program, but management abused it.

Video Records would assist in a number of accident investigations. It just needs to be stored in a module like a CVR/FDR and subject to the same rules (Cannot be retrieved unless there is an incident, legally protected, only section related to the incident can be used during an investigation by the appropriate national authority - although previous records still in storage could be reviewed for consistent behavior drying an incident investigation just as previous flight data and voice records are sometimes reviewed during an investigation).

I drive Lyft/Uber. My dash-cam has saved me 3 times as it clearly shows what did and did not happen and usually the audio is also very good (not all ride-share passengers behave well and the stories that they tell the ride-share companies about what happened... are "interesting" to say the least).

acecrackshot wrote:

TTailedTiger wrote:

[

Had they run the checklist they would have caught their error. Are you disagreeing with that?

What is your professional or personal basis for this assessment?

Because that is what checklists are for. Are you seriously claiming running a checklist is just for giggles?

2175301 wrote:

Video Records would assist in a number of accident investigations. It just needs to be stored in a module like a CVR/FDR and subject to the same rules (Cannot be retrieved unless there is an incident, legally protected, only section related to the incident can be used during an investigation by the appropriate national authority - although previous records still in storage could be reviewed for consistent behavior drying an incident investigation just as previous flight data and voice records are sometimes reviewed during an investigation).

I drive Lyft/Uber. My dash-cam has saved me 3 times as it clearly shows what did and did not happen and usually the audio is also very good (not all ride-share passengers behave well and the stories that they tell the ride-share companies about what happened... are "interesting" to say the least).

CVR/FDR needs to be maintained and is sometimes checked if needed. The airline certainly has access to the data.

TTailedTiger wrote:

acecrackshot wrote:

TTailedTiger wrote:

[

Had they run the checklist they would have caught their error. Are you disagreeing with that?

What is your professional or personal basis for this assessment?

Because that is what checklists are for. Are you seriously claiming running a checklist is just for giggles?

Do you know anything about DL in those years? Did you read the part where Jim Burnett wanted to term DL management and the FAA as causal, not just contributing to the accident. T. Allen MacArtor put them under a microscope after that and other accidents or incidents. Accidents are not as simple as you’d like to believe. Video of that crew wouldn’t change a thing on the leadership side. BTW, how much experience do you have in a professional cockpit to be a judge?

CrewBunk wrote:

zeke wrote:

They know exactly what happened to the aircraft, we know why it crashed. The FDR and CVR gave them that information.

Exactly!

I can think of no crash left unsolved where the FDR and CVR were recovered. And ..... a video feed would have solved it.

We don't know if a pilot on Northwest 255 pulled a circuit breaker. That conclusion is speculation based on circumstantial evidence and testimony of prior behavior. Not only would a video system have answered that question - possibly exculpating the pilots - it might have prevented the accident if secret rule-breaking behavior in the cockpit was indeed the cause.

32andBelow wrote:

2175301 wrote:

Video Records would assist in a number of accident investigations. It just needs to be stored in a module like a CVR/FDR and subject to the same rules (Cannot be retrieved unless there is an incident, legally protected, only section related to the incident can be used during an investigation by the appropriate national authority - although previous records still in storage could be reviewed for consistent behavior drying an incident investigation just as previous flight data and voice records are sometimes reviewed during an investigation).

I drive Lyft/Uber. My dash-cam has saved me 3 times as it clearly shows what did and did not happen and usually the audio is also very good (not all ride-share passengers behave well and the stories that they tell the ride-share companies about what happened... are "interesting" to say the least).

CVR/FDR needs to be maintained and is sometimes checked if needed. The airline certainly has access to the data.

Yes, but they cannot legally use it.

GalaxyFlyer wrote:

TTailedTiger wrote:

acecrackshot wrote:

What is your professional or personal basis for this assessment?

Because that is what checklists are for. Are you seriously claiming running a checklist is just for giggles?

Do you know anything about DL in those years? Did you read the part where Jim Burnett wanted to term DL management and the FAA as causal, not just contributing to the accident. T. Allen MacArtor put them under a microscope after that and other accidents or incidents. Accidents are not as simple as you’d like to believe. Video of that crew wouldn’t change a thing on the leadership side. BTW, how much experience do you have in a professional cockpit to be a judge?

I don't. And it doesn't matter. I don't have to be a cop to know when one messes up and kills an innocent person . I know how it supposed to be done in theory. A human factors professor of mine helped author CRM procedures at two major airlines. Are you telling me airline pilots are just ignoring the procedures? Following the checklist was drilled into me from my very first fligjtesson. I don't deviate from it. Why are some going out of their way to defend any and every pilot that messes up? Sometimes people just screw up. We do our best to find out and work to fix it. But many are stubborn and will never learn from past mistakes. If you dont want management in your cockpit like many pilots like to shout, then you don't get to blame management when you mess up. I really don't like it when people won't own up to their mistakes and look for any other avenue to throw the blame at. I can only think of one airline pilot involved in a crash that took ownership of their bad decision and that was the United DC-8 captain that ran the plane out of fuel near PDX. He sincerely regretted what he did that night and it haunted him the rest of his life. He didn't throw out a million different reasons for why he was also a victim like so many do. It was his fault and owned up to it. People need to do that more often.

We’re not necessarily defending the pilots, but you don’t realize their mistakes don’t happen in a vacuum. Aircraft design, leadership, training programs, cultures are involved in why that mistake happened. In UPT, there was a sign that, to effect, when a pilot “rides one in” we all have a part in it. We could have instructed better, passed on a lesson clearer, asked questions. That UA pilot said, he burn down minimum fuel because it didn’t fire in a gear up landing. Had a gear problem and did just what he planned, only a little too far.

Read the many reports as I have , go to the dozen or so funerals of pilots who showed how it shouldn’t be done, do a couple of investigations and get back as to how simple accidents in aviation are.

Can't happen soon enough.

GalaxyFlyer wrote:

We’re not necessarily defending the pilots, but you don’t realize their mistakes don’t happen in a vacuum. Aircraft design, leadership, training programs, cultures are involved in why that mistake happened. In UPT, there was a sign that, to effect, when a pilot “rides one in” we all have a part in it. We could have instructed better, passed on a lesson clearer, asked questions. That UA pilot said, he burn down minimum fuel because it didn’t fire in a gear up landing. Had a gear problem and did just what he planned, only a little too far.

Read the many reports as I have , go to the dozen or so funerals of pilots who showed how it shouldn’t be done, do a couple of investigations and get back as to how simple accidents in aviation are.

While you are correct that most mistakes don't happen in a vacuum, there are cases where pilots (and others) intentionally take shortcuts or just make simply make mistakes. Alertness or distractions can also be a factor.

My real background on this is that within the nuclear industry I was a certified root cause investigator and ran root cause investigations. I had the exact same level of training and certifications that the lead investigators for the NTSB have (and some of the classes are taught by the same company that teaches some of the NTSB courses). My certifications are no longer current. We did study all the major aircraft investigations as part of our background and annual recertification requirements along with key plant based or other disaster investigations.

In the nuclear world our root cause investigations are typically in the 2-6 month range and my memory is that I was on one that lasted about 9 months (and one whith the very rare conclusion was that the incident was caused by a person being essentially willfully negligent in their duties - that got the NRC's interest real fast and then I had to educate a legal firm as the NRC started an enforcement investigation - and I believe that person who was now at another plant got banned from the industry as a result). In the nuclear world root cause teams always includes at least 1 person from Engineering, Operations, and Maintenance. They commonly also have people from Training and the Procedures Writing Group. Security and any outside vendor involved may also be on the team.

Yes, there are many factors that go into why a person does something that turns out to be not right or leading to an incident. Most common is that there are hidden historical mistakes or misunderstandings in the procedures or inadequate training (the operator or pilot is "set up" to fail if that situation occurs). Also common is that there are distraction or workload issues.

Then there is the question of what did the operators or pilots actually do. Nuclear plants have the equivalent of aircraft data recorders for the control room and many remote control panels. But, what were the operators doing at the time of the incident and how did they actually react?

I've led the interviews of control room and other plant operators more than once (and engineering and maintenance people involved in an issue). The last Root Cause Investigation I was involved with was why did a recently rewound & overhauled very large motor (I think about 5000 HP) fail and more importantly why did that lead to the power plant being tripped offline - as it should have been possible to keep the power plant online at least half power (actually about 60% once re-stabilized).

5 different people in the control room. 5 similar stories - but everyone had certain details different (which is always the case), and the differences in those details would affect why the plant could not be saved and had to be tripped offline.

2 different plant operators responded to the pump/motor location at the 1st indication of trouble; and again had similar stories that matched in the main concepts, with differences in the details on what each person did and observed that other person to do. The plant operators could not have affected the plant trip - and the information on the observed pump motor issues were adequately communicated to the control room.

7 years ago easy to use and cameras and recorders did not exist to record the actions in control room (which would have told us exactly what had been done and by who). We did talk about how cameras were an emerging technology and that the plant should look at putting them in the control room to answer the questions (I assume that they are there now).

In the end the final report could not come to a conclusion on some of the details of what had actually happened in the control room and why the situation deteriorated to the point that the only reasonable decision was to trip the plant offline; however, the operators were given the benefit of the doubt and their general explanation on why they could not respond fast enough was presented in the report and accepted.

My experience tells me that video records of the cockpit will provide meaningful data on a number of aviation events. There is a real difference in just looking at the time of the the control inputs and system values, and even listening to what they are saying.. and seeing what they were doing when things developed and how they reacted.

I believe it will lead to better aviation safety.

Have a great day,

hayzel777 wrote:

In the NTSB's 2021 top-10 most wanted list, Cockpit Video Recorders have resurfaced. The agency believes the video would have helped investigators determine what exactly went wrong in the LionAir, Atlas, and Ethiopian crashes and the human factors involved. Agency also recommended a recorder in the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash report.

ALPA and the FAA oppose this suggestion; ALPA thinks that the video would be misconstrued and FAA has privacy concerns.

https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/nts ... 10.article

How about NO.

Why should Pilots not be disciplined for doing something wrong? Why do they control flight data and not their employers?

UpNAWAy wrote:

Why should Pilots not be disciplined for doing something wrong? Why do they control flight data and not their employers?

Yeah that's the million dollar question that none of them will answer. What are they doing that is so secretive? It seems to be most prevalent from the older captains. My guess is they frequently intimidate their coworkers and don't want that captured. Skygod mentality and part of the dangerous attitudes you learn as a private pilot.

UpNAWAy wrote:

Why should Pilots not be disciplined for doing something wrong? Why do they control flight data and not their employers?

Where did you get the idea they’re not disciplined? Ever heard of time off without pay? They don’t control the data; I see it in FDM without any pilot control over it.

TTailedTiger wrote:

UpNAWAy wrote:

Why should Pilots not be disciplined for doing something wrong? Why do they control flight data and not their employers?

Yeah that's the million dollar question that none of them will answer. What are they doing that is so secretive? It seems to be most prevalent from the older captains. My guess is they frequently intimidate their coworkers and don't want that captured. Skygod mentality and part of the dangerous attitudes you learn as a private pilot.

You have no idea of the age of pilots, here or on the line and how they act. You can guess all you want, but you admit to no actual knowledge of how professional crews work, then dredge up 35-year old accidents to support your non-position.

VSMUT wrote:

No, no, no. Flight Data Monitoring has shown that management is completely unable to handle this stuff responsibly. This is going to devolve faster than you can imagine into managements slapping the pilots over their wrists for reading the newspaper while in cruise.

Not to be pedantic, but you are paid by flight hour to fly and monitor the plane.

Why not limit youself to that?

Gremlinzzzz wrote:

VSMUT wrote:

No, no, no. Flight Data Monitoring has shown that management is completely unable to handle this stuff responsibly. This is going to devolve faster than you can imagine into managements slapping the pilots over their wrists for reading the newspaper while in cruise.

Not to be pedantic, but you are paid by flight hour to fly and monitor the plane.

Why not limit youself to that?

I am paid a monthly wage, not hourly, as is the norm in Europe. My job is to fly safely from A to B, the job gets done. Further, I would suggest that the airlines don't have safety as their number 1 priority. Remember when those Asiana pilots crashed a perfectly flyable 777 in San Francisco because they forgot how to fly? That was because the airline mandated that pilots should avoid flying by hand. A LOT of airlines still maintain a policy of banning hand flying. Flight Data Monitoring is how they monitor and police us to make sure we don't ever keep our skills up to scratch. You are suggesting giving the bean counters another way of controlling us.

Besides that, monitoring staff with cameras suggested is illegal where I live and work. It shouldn't be any different because the employers can claim it is necessary for safety.

Hmm...

How will installation of cockpit video recorder improve safety? What is it that needs prevention that the solution is a camera? Is it not to cause the opposite that human factor is likely to be affected and/or even the CRM?

OTOH,

Only for exclusive use of investigators, the cockpit video recorder is a great help to expedite investigations, formulating corrections, rule changes and implementations depending on the case.

VSMUT wrote:

Gremlinzzzz wrote:

VSMUT wrote:

No, no, no. Flight Data Monitoring has shown that management is completely unable to handle this stuff responsibly. This is going to devolve faster than you can imagine into managements slapping the pilots over their wrists for reading the newspaper while in cruise.

Not to be pedantic, but you are paid by flight hour to fly and monitor the plane.

Why not limit youself to that?

I am paid a monthly wage, not hourly, as is the norm in Europe. My job is to fly safely from A to B, the job gets done. Further, I would suggest that the airlines don't have safety as their number 1 priority. Remember when those Asiana pilots crashed a perfectly flyable 777 in San Francisco because they forgot how to fly? That was because the airline mandated that pilots should avoid flying by hand. A LOT of airlines still maintain a policy of banning hand flying. Flight Data Monitoring is how they monitor and police us to make sure we don't ever keep our skills up to scratch. You are suggesting giving the bean counters another way of controlling us.

Besides that, monitoring staff with cameras suggested is illegal where I live and work. It shouldn't be any different because the employers can claim it is necessary for safety.

This is a strange way of looking at things.

You are paid for the time you work, and it might sound strange to pilots, but companies have a specific way which they want their work done.

Is it controlling the employees? No, it is controlling work flow and there are people who sit down and decide how things are supposed to be done.

I am not naive to think that the implementation of such processes is perfect, or that some are not going to be misused by rogue managers. I am not silly in also seeing why airlines, in an industry where majority of accidents are down to pilot error would want to limit hand flying. Why would any airline not want to decrease liability at a time when technology has improved to help them do that?

Not everything is about the pilot, or revolves around them and the moment you stop thinking like this and start seeing the bigger picture, the better.

There are a lot of things employers ask for what are not part of what affects work like dress code, no tattoos, insisting that you be at the office even if it is low season and insisting that on company time, even with no work, you do not browse or spend time reading newspapers.

It is not them being controlling, it is them caring about image and weeding out practices that if left unchecked could be detrimental? There was the case of a Delta flight where pilots got so consumed discussing workplace policies that they forgot to monitor the flight ir to communicate with ATC. Essentially not doing what they were supposed to be doing.

Fly the plane, and when autopilot is on, monitor the plane. This is what a pilot is paid to do, and if there is a problem, ensure a safe landing or save as many souls as possible.

I know of airlines that banned flight attendants using their phones because it was affecting service delivery. I do not know why the cockpit is this private place where no company ought to monitor what happens. Most of us do what we are supposed to do and limit ourselves to just that when on company time. And we still deliver whether under supervision or not. It is called discipline.

Plus, aviation is about safety. All public transport is centered around safety, and once one regulator implements, others will follow.