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Comment by zeusk | Hacker News Reader

Couple of issues here; the first and foremost - recording people at their workplace. We can all argue how privacy is unreasonable in public but recording let alone pilots but anyone continuously at work will receive big pushback.

Also video occupies much more data than most other streams of information stored on blackbox. This coupled with the fact that anything aviation related takes decades to get into widespread use and it was only quite recently that solid state storage became so dense and ubiquitous.

Video surveillance at airports is getting more widespread, just search for SFO asiana.

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It's the same issue with the audio recording. The solution is it's in a loop, and those recordings are almost never released.

As for video, VHS quality is about 1Gb per hour. Meaning you can put 64 hours on an ordinary USB stick about the size of my thumbnail. Furthermore, video recording has nothing to do with flying the airplane, so there are no safety/certification issues. It doesn't even have to be in a crashproof box.

I know that airports now have video surveillance, but those cameras are pointed mostly at the tarmac for security purposes, not at the runways for flight ops.

BTW, I can buy a dashcam for $100 that records HD in a loop and plugs into a cigarette lighter. I'm not buying there's any technical or cost issue with installing one in the cockpit. I will buy that the problems are all bureaucratic in nature.

Just make a secure bracket for it, and a 12V feed.

If you have that to add, I am pretty sure you don't have any formal experience with aviation.

Even the nuts and bolts that go on aircraft can cost >$100. The problems are not all bureaucratic, and I get HN's hate of bureaucracy but for life-and-death matters - I'd rather default to caution than move fast and break necks attitude of SV/Tech.

Just to give you an example, lookup the swissair in-flight entertainment fire incident. Tacking couple of screens and media server onto an existing plane should be fine right? turns out not really and 215 people paid the price of that decision with their lives.

Privacy aside, being watched does affect decision making.

If you think recording people at their jobs will make things safer, why not apply it for the least safe mode of transportation first - why doesn't the gov/NHTSA mandate a video and data recorder in your car and the police and insurance can take a look at it next time you crash to decide who/what caused it.

No need for video recording on general aviation, but a public transport is a completely different thing.

Any time I enter a bus in my town, I see that it has a number of cameras, which point to the road, to the passengers, and to the driver as well. Why should a plane be different?

> If you have that to add, I am pretty sure you don't have any formal experience with aviation

Walter Bright is an aerospace engineer, programmer of flight critical systems of airliners, son of Charles Bright. You are way off on your accusation.

citation: https://www.amazon.ca/Jet-Makers-Charles-Bright-ebook/dp/B00...

>why doesn't the gov/NHTSA mandate a video and data recorder in your car

The automakers were already "voluntarily" putting EDRs in cars, so no need to mandate it.

From 15 years ago, standards were set so that data can be retrieved after an accident and such:

https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/fmvss/EDRFinalRu...

> Just to give you an example, lookup the swissair in-flight entertainment fire incident. Tacking couple of screens and media server onto an existing plane should be fine right? turns out not really and 215 people paid the price of that decision with their lives.

I'm not super familiar with this one, but based on a quick skim of the TSB report (http://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/aviation/1998/a98h...) it looks like the issue here was not the IFE itself but a poor installation that significantly differed from the certified configuration and resulted in chafing on power wires.

It's also worth noting that this happened in the '90s when networked personal IFE systems were still in their infancy. It's 2021, there are no unsolved problems in installing a few cameras in an aircraft. A lot of them already have cameras accessible through the IFE, putting one more in the cockpit and a hardened DVR in the back isn't exactly rocket science.

Yes, aviation stuff often has a few zeroes added on to the price tag for good and bad reasons, but we're basically talking about a dashcam here. Low triple digit prices for non-aviation hardware, so even if you multiply the price times 100 it's still not really significant compared to the cost of an airliner.

There are no good technical reasons to not have video.

No, if you're a pilot in charge of a few hundred lives + the lives of a few hundred more in case you crash on the ground your 'privacy at work' is trumped by the responsibilities you have taken on. That's not a good argument. What is a good argument is that people might behave different if they believed that there would be consequences for their actions, and this might either be a negative (if they don't act for fear of repercussions) or a positive (if they don't perform acts that could endanger the aircraft knowing that these are recorded).

> recording let alone pilots but anyone continuously at work will receive big pushback

I think we can say that when you have hundreds of people's lives in your hands you are accepting a higher level of oversight and invasion of privacy.

The same reason some people in some careers have to go through deeply invasive background checks.

We record bus drivers, for goodness' sake. We should be able to record pilots.

I agree that a hardened process relying on multiple SSD (that are then uploaded and wiped after landing at an airport) would be a good technical direction.

This already happens. At least here in Brazil, offices have security cameras in pretty much every environment, except the restrooms.

An office is a shared environment, usually not owned by the people who work there, that exists only for job related activities. Just like companies can monitor your company issued email, network traffic and cell phone, they can monitor your activities in the workspace.

I'm a privacy advocate, I avoid Google and Facebook as much as I can, but even I understand the difference between private and professional life. One has an assumption of privacy, the other doesn't.

Note that this is not the case in all jurisdictions. In many European countries, the company cannot monitor employees' corporate emails without specific justification.

There isn't an inch in Taipei that doesn't have a CCTV on it.

In the US I see cameras at every gas station, donut shop, drug store, liquor store, and lab I go into. None of these places are as high stakes or high security as an airport.

why we cannot just delete record when airplane take off next time? if airplane landing safely, we do not need record anymore.

> Couple of issues here; the first and foremost - recording people at their workplace. We can all argue how privacy is unreasonable in public but recording let alone pilots but anyone continuously at work will receive big pushback.

Casinos do it. Banks do it. Convenience stores do it. The TSA records it's workers and you when you go through security. This doesn't seem like much of a hurdle.

For example: https://www.jwincorporated.com/projects/ohare-international-...

You’re arguing against monitoring equipment in the cockpit in an article that’s about people arguing against monitoring equipment in the cockpit. Thanks for making me laugh today. I appreciate you.

"If the people in the cockpit aren't doing anything wrong, they have nothing to worry about".

A reasonable argument for stoners lighting up in the supermarket carpark.

Not so for someone flying several tons of metal that will absolutely fuck up the lives of many people if they aren't paying full attention.

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