Originally Posted by
flipster
Is this a good idea and should it be welcomed as an advance in safety standards, or should pilots and their unions fight it all the way as an invasion of privacy? Discuss.
I think I can understand why an airline would want to do something like this. It's somewhat routine, unfortunately, for the 'sterile cockpit' issue to be raised after almost every accident, and it will often be simplistically reported in the media that the "crew failed to follow FAA rules" or some such. The airline then gets put in the dock (at least in media terms) for the "lax standards" in their cockpits. If you were being blamed for failing to enforce the sterile cockpit, wouldn't you cast around for a way to do so, and isn't this the obvious way to do so?
It's the same logic that encourages companies to monitor, for example, email/internet use at work - if you use the company IT equipment to, say, disseminate pornography, or hate literature, or whatever, the headlines won't be "Joe Schmuck caught ..." - it'll be "Megacorp employee Joe Schmuck caught ...".
I have a degree of scepticism as to the degree to which an absolutely sterile cockpit is actually causal in a number of the accidents in which it's become an issue, though. And there's obvious opportunity for abuse of such monitoring, too.
Either way, it may follow that Airlines' execs' meetings should also be recorded and made available to their company's aircrew, just in case there are any safety implications?
Now that's not really the same thing. I don't think anyone's going to claim that you need a "sterile boardroom", are they? (Indeed, if it's all deathly quiet there, that implies that they AREN'T doing their job, surely.)