This letter summarizes the Safety Board’s rationale for issuing the recommendations.... [details]... a long history of accident and incident investigations that might have benefited from the capture of a graphic record of the cockpit environment. Reconstructing the events that led to many accidents has been difficult for investigators because of limited data. ...
That was a good post IGH.
Over the years I have probably read hundreds of accident report summaries for my own education and like many others watched programs like air crash investigation. It always struck me as outdated how the investigators would spend a lot of time analysing the CVR for background noises to determine whether certain switches or controls were operated when a video would fill in a lot of the gaps that prevented finding out what really happened.
The current Air France accident also raises a suggestion of bursting a data packet over the aircrafts sat link , if there were numerous alerts and error messages the airlines central computer could request a data dump from the CVR, FDR and VIR .
Longer term you can see where we are heading anyway , real time remote monitoring and recording of all aspects of the flight as a back up. Would be a lot easier than trying to find black boxes off the sea floor at 15 or 20 thousand feet.