PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - CVR in court - interesting dilemma
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Old 16th Oct 2002, 14:03
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GlueBall
 
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Back in the 60s there was the big hullabaloo about CVRs. Today it's about cockpit videos. It will come to pass and everyone sooner or later will adapt and keep on flying.

The "front office" is not exactly a "private" area. We are held not only responsible, but held accountable to the safety of 100s of pax and a multimillion dollar airframe and engines. And when you accept this sort of job (and pay) you subject yourself to a much higher level of training, surveillance and overall scrutiny than a crane operator at a construction site.

And when 3 pilots with six eyeballs take off on a wrong runway, or when two pilots with 4 eyeballs fly into a mountain and kill many people and cause hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage, and generate many more hundreds of millions of dollars in wrongful death lawsuits, then many parties concerned have an intrinsic need to know why. But moreover, the flying public has a right to know why planes crash, so that each prospective pax can make a self satisfying decision whether to fly today, what airline to choose or not to choose or what airplane to choose or not to choose.

And when in the case of SQ006 or AA965 the probable cause was found to be gross pilots' error, then the cockpit activities and conversational facts cannot be kept very private anymore. Death, injury and property losses of such magnitude far outweigh any operating crew's privacy concerns in the cockpit.

At the end of every successful flight, the CVR conversations can easily be erased. Assuredly, future video cockpit systems will have that feature.
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