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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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