Video Cameras in the Flight Deck of Airplanes

Video Cameras in the Flight Deck of Airplanes

Introduction

Airline accidents today, like the recent American Airlines crash in Queens, N.Y., can puzzle safety experts. They struggle for months, even years, often unable to explain fully flights problems or how the pilots reacted. Video cameras in the flight deck could help answer such critical questions (Brueckner, 2009).

Putting video cameras on airplanes might seem a settled matter. Sept.11proved the need for a visual record inside the airplane, and some airlines are testing security cameras for passenger cabins. Flight attendants have endorsed the idea of cabin cameras. But putting cameras in the flight deck is controversial. Pilots' unions consider them an invasion of workplace privacy. They fear flight deck videos of a crash will be splashed across television screens. These are legitimate concerns that can be addressed with legal protections. They are not reasons to leave safety investigators hampered. Flight attendants and passengers are willing to accept less privacy to make air travel more secure. Pilots should accept less privacy in the flight deck to make flying safer.

Airline accidents are getting harder to solve. Decades of good safety work have eliminated the most obvious threats. Today, an airliner crash typically results from a chain of subtle errors and flaws, each minor on its own but deadly in combination. Airliners are also far more complicated than they were 20 years ago. They use intricate computer systems to fly and video displays to tell pilots what is going on. The flight deck voice recorder and flight data recorder; the "black boxes, cannot capture all of the computer and video-display information. Black boxes are invaluable in revealing what the plane and its pilots were doing before a crash. But they do not capture hand, foot and body movements as pilots move controls and switches. They don't record all of the problems pilots face during an emergency, like fire or smoke. This kind of information, captured on video recorders, can be essential in a crash investigation.

For example, take the 1994 crash of a Boeing 737 near Pittsburgh. Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board, which I led at the time, focused on problems with side-to-side control, based on their probe of a similar crash in 1991. The key question was: Did the pilots cause the crash or did the airplane's control system fail? Neither black box could answer that question. The flight recorder told what had happened to the airplane, but not why. The voice recorder captured grunts and exclamations as the pilots wrestled with a problem, but nothing about the nature of that problem. It took four years for the safety board to conclude that a control- system flaw was responsible for both crashes (Catharine et al., 2009).

Other investigations have been hampered by a dearth of information from the flight deck, including the 1998 Swissair crash off Nova Scotia, the 1999 EgyptAir crash off Nantucket and the 2000 Alaska Airlines crash off Southern ...