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Comment by yunohn | Hacker News Reader

Huh? Are you seriously asking why commercial airliners don’t have 4K GoPros to record UAP/UFOs?

I'm wondering why a multi-million dollar aircraft doesn't have a $10k imaging system when I put a $300 imaging system on my $30k car. If I'm willing to spend 1% to understand equipment damage then why would this logic not follow for a billion dollar fleet of aircraft?

Like-minded drivers have caught amazing videos of meteors. Planes could do the same for supposedly legitimate UAP sightings.

Well would you increase the budget of your production grade deliverables for maybe proving to internet forum visitors that your product sometimes is in the presence of weird phenomena?

Are you suggesting NARCAP is an internet forum?

They don't seem to think the camera resolution is a problem in taking these sightings seriously, as opposed to random person here I'm responding to. Seems to indicate something doesn't it?

Oh I dunno. Maybe because that's what people do? We put billions into explaining stuff we don't understand.

Building a particle accelerator is not the same as adding 1% to the cost of an already costly machine for the off chance of proving some marginal phenomena visually.

Considering this goes up to congress and they think it might be a national security threat I don't think it's bad idea. It's also pretty doubtful this will even increase the cost by 1%.

Sure. Random internet forum person demands better evidence to be convinced, when a) we don't even have all data; b) no-one cares what random internet forum person thinks. We are watching from the sidelines jeering for irrelevant changes.

I'm not sure about all of that, but I know a lot of people are paid to count a lot of beans. There are lots of beans saved from diagnostics, especially where insurance is involved.

Have you heard of black boxes? I don't think dashboard cams are a limiting factor for airplanes here...

Indeed I have. It's pretty wild that modern FDRs don't include video. There isn't a good justification other than "it's too much effort to make any change", which is a sign of a dangerous system.

Ok go out there and convince people in charge of that. Must be easier than convincing me, who has no stakes in it either way...

Probably for the same reason nobody thought it was possible to make a plane disappear before MH70 or whatever it was.

What purpose would adding an imaging system serve? The purpose is obvious for your car, cars crash all the time. Planes rarely do and it seems we already get all the data we need when they do crash to fix and prevent that reason from happening again.

Many commercial airlines at least international (like emirates) have cameras all over. You can even watch it from your seat.

They’re not 4K and they’re not meant to be aimed at UAPs. IME they don’t have long term storage either.

No, that’s not what I’m asking, because a GoPro costs about $400. I’m asking why they don’t have something 10x better than a GoPro.

Two Boeing 737 Max aircraft crashed because they didn't have a backup angle-of-attack sensor. According to a former NTSB director, "this is a fairly simple external device that can get damaged on a regular basis."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-737-ma...

I'm guessing the reason they didn't put a lifesaving backup sensor on the plane might be sorta similar to the reason they don't add high-definition cameras in case of UFOs.

That is truly mental.

More "why don't they have general-purpose dashcam-equivalents", for capturing anything of interest, e.g. the near-miss that was on HN yesterday.

Yes. Why is that unreasonable?

It's unreasonable because installing and maintaining aviation qualified cameras is expensive. You can't just strap a consumer action camera to the wing and expect the FAA to approve. Airlines have no incentive to pay for extra cameras.

There are plenty incentives to including imaging as part of black boxes. Nothing unreasonable about it. It would help elucidate several non-UFO normal life kind of incidents.

If there were, they'd do it, but it doesn't help their business, so they don't.

They must be some kind of gods really. Anything they do is because it make perfect sense. If there's something they're not doing it's because of course it's not worth doing!

Yeah, who'd think a business would try and not spend money on something they don't need in a cut-throat industry.

Imaging and storage used to be much more expensive, so if this decision was to be reviewed today, I am pretty sure regulators would start requiring it.

Just because things are as they are, doesn't mean that they couldn't be better.

Nah. External cameras wouldn't do anything significant to improve safety or help with crash investigations so there's no reason for the FAA to impose such a requirement. It's just a silly idea.

But regulators do revisit existing rules all the time. If you really want this then feel free to file a formal petition for rulemaking. If you do that then they'll have to at least look at it.

https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/rulemaking/petition

Yep. It’s the same reason why a lot of planes still have a “no smoking” light even though smoking hasn’t been allowed on planes for years. If they took them out, they’d have to recertify the electronics. It’s much easier and cheaper to have a useless light that always stays on than to go through that process to remove it.

Not to mention creating another source of liability for themselves. "And then the pilot did WHAT?"

Except that's already logged extensively on the black box (which is rm actually red) flight recorder, so that doesn't seem like a good excuse.

I think a pilot could easily suction cup a GoPro on a mount to the back of the cockpit door, facing the whole cockpit.

That would be a policy violation at any major US airline. They don't want random objects in the cockpit which could come loose in severe turbulence or a crash, causing a safety hazard.

It would be pointless for this use case anyway. The field of view through the cockpit windows is very narrow and any UAP would only show up as a few blurry pixels.

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