They need lots of that in Iberia.
Aviation Video: Airbus A340-300 - Iberia
Anyway, I indeed do not know much about FOQA and similar programs, but got up to speed and read a couple of articles, like
Avionics Magazine :: FOQA: Training Tool, And More
Looks like it's slowly (not as fast as some people here seem to think) catching up with airliners and starting to become effective, specially with newer aircrafts where extensive computer use makes it easier to monitor many parameters.
I doubt it has made much in-roads in ATR's or MD-80's of small airliners, but maybe it'll get there.
Putting miniature solid state "mini-QARs" that in many cases even upload the information wirelessly (or manually on memory/PCMCIA cards) is a good idea and provide quite a bit of monitoring over flight performance to be then analysed by software and supervisors.
Still, crew "attitude" in their work place (closed cockpit) monitoring could still get a helping hand from similar solid state recording that shows the audio/video of the performance.
As I said, I'm not "all in" for spying on the pilots, but I'm also not "all in" for blaming the managers for "letting them do" unsafe practices they have not been encouraged to do during training.
This FOQA thing seems to be another great tool for increasing safety and a step in the right direction, but one that is quite recent, not as widely used yet, not 100% effective (but pretty good) and not too expensive.
So I'm all for a lot more of it.
Do you think that if such a program was being used on this MD-82 over at Spanair it would've prevented the accident?
Obviously, not necessarily, unless it was able to indicate that this particular crew was often not following all the checklists items like they should, which is likely not the case. They obviously (I'd like to think), never before neglected to lower the flaps or set any other important item from the checklist. But a video showing them rushing through items or not checking them properly would've raised a red flag.
FOQA can probably not detect, i.e., that a crew is hardly ever visually checking flaps/slats indicators when they activate the handles. A video showing how they lower the handles w/o hardly even looking at the handle itself and quickly moving to another item is a clear indication, though.