Originally Posted by
Lookleft
The ironic part of the reluctance to accept cockpit video recorders is that the objections are being undermined by all the airline pilot u toobers and social media junkies who are recording their day at work. They are assuming that all those Go-Pros and selfies will not be made available to investigators if their approach to whatever holiday island goes pear shaped. I remember seeing a video from an engineer's phone who was sitting in the jump seat of an Air New Guinea 737 that landed short of the runway in a heavy shower. The video showed the Captains ND with the magenta line going to the runway but the wx radar overlay showing a big mass of red on the final stages of the approach. In the absence of any call outs by the PNF the CVR and FDR would not tell the investigators the full story of that approach. The video showed the investigators what the pilots saw. So there is already de-facto cockpit video recorder so the industry should just mandate it and put similar protocols around it similar to the CVR and FDR.
Yes, there are a lot of those 'junkies', but only a small percentage of the real world. (I don't even own a phone that can take videos and have very often been very wary of those wanting to video everything in sight in my flight-deck/cockpit.)
But the real problem with any cockpit video recorders would be who would have access to them. You hear far, far too many recordings/transcripts from CVRs being broadcast far too widely after an incident where those who don't have a clue (many on here, sadly!) focus on the irrelevant because it is 'sensational' rather then relevant. I know of one crew who cringed when they listened to the CVR together with the UK AAIB of the comments that they had been passing immediately before an incident (the AAIB brushed it aside saying "don't worry, we hear worse"!) but those (irrelevant) comments were
NOT made available to the public simply because they were not relevant. But in far too many 'regimes', those comments are made available. I understand that many years ago the New Zealand government decided that the police and prosecuting authorities could have first access to CVRs after any incident. As a result New Zealand pilots went through a significant period of not talking on the flight deck and communicating with hand gestures. This very, very rapidly cause a reversal of that decision as the response was not safe, so the accident investigators now have first access to the CVRs and only release them if there is obvious criminal intent. Cockpit video recorders would be a step far, far too far unless there were absolutely cast iron guarantees over restrictions on their use and their availability to the the idiot public and the idiot media.