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Comment by t0mas88 | Hacker News Reader

Voice recording is a big privacy concern for the crew. This is our workplace, so you would be recording every conversation, also any idle chat of which there is quite a lot in cruise flight. The current voice recording is only accepted by the crew with the agreement that it is not stored, and can only be pulled after a serious incident in which case there will be a no-blame investigation.

But what you're trying to solve, already exists without the voice recording part. It's called FOQA or Flight Operations Quality Assurance. Mandatory for airlines in Europe, not yet mandatory in the US but may be in the future.

It records hundreds of parameters from engine indications to touchdown speed, G-loading, control inputs etc. Automatically uploaded to the operator and tracked for the whole fleet. That data is de-identified and used for safety analysis and improvement.

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Respectfully, it is your workplace in which you're responsible for the lives of thousands of people each week. I don't think it's unreasonable to keep proper tabs.

Respectfully: the pilots have been doing an absolutely excellent job with it for decades without us having to destroy their privacy.

An argument can easily be made that this extra stress will make flying less safe.

Edit: my next car will probably have mandatory spyware and unlike pilots there won't be a guaranteed no blame process if something happens. It is pretty easy to see how this will be abused by insurance companies and data harvesters.

I think I kind of understand the processes that lead to this. But I seriously wish tech people wouldn't be accepting it and even argue for it.

Respectfully, history is a terrible measure for carrying on as we have.

Tech people are arguing for accountability in a life/death scenario.

That there is no privacy in public spaces is a longstanding social/legal tradition. A cockpit is physically private for physical security reasons but the pilots in the cockpit are acting on behalf of public trust. Their social norms in that physical context are not their own to define.

If pilots want privacy they can quit and sit at home.

Free market at play, no airline can afford to say "well then quit and sit at home". There is a huge pilot shortage. No airline in their right mind is about to do things their workforce doesn't want.

Just to illustrate, 5 years ago a first officer on year 2 pay would make on average 40-50k per year. In 2023 that has increased to 143k per year for all three American Airlines owned regionals (plus a 165k retention bonus). Similar for Spirit, increased to 142k standard and 145k on the Airbus. And JetBlue to 160k for the A320 and 153k for the A220.

In this market, the first airline CEO to say "well then quit and sit at home" to their union will have half their workforce walk out within months.

Precisely why the FAA should implement this and not leave it up to the airlines.

So far I can't see anyone coming up with any cases were this would have made life safer or even solved a previously unsolved case.

The law of diminishing returns very much exist, and as one of my teachers in engineering once pointed out: if you really want to use surveillance to put a dent in the crime statistics you should put it in people's living rooms and in their bedrooms.

Do you feel the same way about surveillance of the inside of your car while it's on public roadways?

If I’m a taxi driver or school bus driver, yes!

You're just a able to crash into oncoming traffic as any cabbie. Why should you not be subject to the same intrusive surveillance? What are you hiding?

There's a key distinction between operating a vehicle for commercial purposes and a private operation, not just the ability to harm others. There's a reason why commercial pilots licences are in a completely different league in terms of training and responsibility to PPLs.

> Edit: my next car will probably have mandatory spyware and unlike pilots there won't be a guaranteed no blame process if something happens. It is pretty easy to see how this will be abused by insurance companies and data harvesters.

If anything, the proliferation of dash cams will (and have) lead to bad drivers being appropriately charged more for insurance than good drivers. Previously, if you were cut off and collided with someone, you were always assumed to be at fault if you were behind the other driver.

You can't imagine bad things that mass surveillance will lead to?

People have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their workplace. But expecting safety measures that could potentially prevent hundreds of deaths to be limited to preserve employee privacy is not reasonable.

Couldn’t you say about population mass surveillance too?

As I argue above pilots already have an excellent safety record.

Have you considered what the extra stress of considering ones every word during a long and stressful day can do to someones concentration?

I mean many, the thoughts about what they said earlier this morning is bad enough even if it wasn't recorded.

We already record a couple of hours or so. If you want to record more, it is up to you to come up with data for how many more air traffic accidents we can solve and also to explain how we can know that it won't make air traffic more dangerous.

> how we can know that it won't make air traffic more dangerous.

This is an argument against any change that involves unknowns. I see it often, and I absolutely hate it.

Air travel is an industry with high risk yet a good safety track record. It seems like exactly the sort of place you wouldn't want to experiment. You can argue that this incident is a blemish in that track record, but it's not obvious to me how "add every word uttered by flight crews to a permanent record" would meaningfully address this incident (at least, any more than doing the same for every other job in the supply chain, from factory workers all the way up to the executives at Boeing), and it is obvious to me how it could be harmful.

Well in this case communication broke down among the crew. A recording of that confusion could help in refining procedures.

Everything worked out in this case but that’s because every incident is a lesson.

It would also mean a lot of pilots who have have other options - and I guess those are the best ones - would consider taking those other options instead.

This means airlines will have a smaller pool of less desirable / qualified pilots to choose from.

How can pilots handle flying an airplane, including in crisis situations, if the 'stress' of recording is too much? It's hard to take the argument seriously. Customer service agents can handle it, so can you.

I get that people want their privacy, but if it saves lives, it's a workplace (like customer service and many other jobs that aren't life-threatening), that outweighs it. People get surveilled constantly in their private lives and live with the stress.

There is no evidence it will save lives, you're just exhibiting signs of poor social development by not understanding why this is an issue and being to stubborn to realize. Most people are not engineers, capable of sitting silently for several hours.

I don’t know how loud it is inside a 737 flight deck, but it seems like a reasonably foreseeable outcome of this proposal is that people would start trying to figure out ways to make idle chitchat without going through the headsets. Which would negatively affect safety: if an emergency were to happen during the chitchat, either headsets would need to be readjusted and enabled as the first step of managing it or the emergency might start being dealt with without going through the CVR.

I work on larger UAS systems where we don’t have any form of mandatory recording for the FAA. We do have wireless headsets that we use for comms between the pilot, the GCS operator, the flight director, and whatever engineering support staff are on the ground. The system would allow us to record pretty trivially but we’ve debated this and explicitly decided that we get more value from being able to keep the communication as candid as possible instead of having to worry about having every word we say over comms scrutinized if there’s an incident.

Given the problem here is Boeing, and has been for years, it makes sense to record indefinitely every conversation made while working for Boeing, especially on the golf course.

It is reasonable that passengers know that the desires for the crew to have "idle chat" are less important than safety. But t0mas88 made clear that what is reasonable is less important than what is "accepted by the crew". The crew apparently makes the decisions on safety matters.

The crew makes a lot of decisions on safety matters, that's basically the most important part of the job :-)

But joking aside, in most places there are checks and balances between privacy impact and benefit. We all accept that some government agencies know some of our data, because the net benefit to society is bigger than the loss of privacy. And you would normally try to do such things in the least invasive way possible while achieving the benefit.

Where you go wrong in your passenger rant, is in assuming there is a big safety benefit in more recording of pilots. There were a total of 2 fatalities on US airlines in the last 10 years [1], while billions of passengers were transported. The safety record of airline transport is stellar, without more recording. So yes, I believe it is very reasonable to consider what is and isn't acceptable to the crew being recorded.

[1] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...

Passenger rant?

If ICAO can require keeping 25 hours why should a crew get to choose 2?

I mostly agree with your take. Alas, I think it's ridiculous to fight a 25 hour recording requirement with the privacy argument.

The recording should anyway only be retrieved under specific conditions and in a controlled environment.

In this specific case the longer recording duration may have actually aided the investigation and thus further improve airline safety.

Agree. My comment was responding to someone saying "Why stop at 25? Record all of every flight and archive it."

There is also more nuance to the debate around the 25 hours change. Like you say it should only be used under specific conditions and in a controlled environment, but in the US unfortunately recordings have been leaked and have been used for disciplinary purposes instead of a blame-less investigation for safety.

Europe has had rules for 25 hour recording since 2021, as far as I know without any opposition. But European recordings have also not been misused before.

"Idle chat" is important for safety.

- They need to work well together, and the better rapport they have with each other the better they're likely to perform in an actual incident. Regular interaction on the job is a part of that.

- They work a job that is often remarkably boring for much of the time. Drowsiness setting in is a real concern - a degree of social interaction is good at both keeping people engaged, and at helping them gauge how alert the other crew members are.

I operate tug boats. It is also remarkably boring for much of the time. The crew knows that they have no privacy when in the wheelhouse operating hundreds of tons of steel. They do have privacy when not on watch. Regardless, decisions around safety are not made by what is "accepted by the crew".

> "Idle chat" is important for safety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_flight_deck_rule

I agree that the crew should feel free to chat. And when there is an accident, they should expect that the recordings are kept.

> during critical phases of flight

This rule applies to the taxiing, takeoff, and descent into landing phases of flight only. It isn't enforced above 10k feet. Idle chatter is important for numerous reasons in any professional working environment and it isn't a reasonable conclusion to say that it should not be allowed in this one.

It's also unfathomably unreasonable to call for storage of all voice recordings of the flight deck in perpetuity. That's ridiculous and is privacy invading. If you want to improve the state of this industry, you are looking in the wrong place.

I did not argue for "storage of all voice recordings of the flight deck in perpetuity". I argued against what is "accepted by the crew" being considered.

> Respectfully, it is your workplace in which you're responsible for the lives of thousands of people each week. I don't think it's unreasonable to keep proper tabs.

Should all medical device software developers have the entirety of their working lives be archived in a similar manner?

Eh, as a software engineer, every piece of text I produce -- from chat to email to memes -- is sitting around, archived and backed up, for years if not longer, waiting to be combed through and potentially taken out of context. A great deal of that is social, idle chat, or complaining about my employer, or outright gossip.

First they came for, etc, but they came for me a long time ago.

But they're not archiving your chit-chat with your coworkers over the water cooler. For pilots, they are (in the cockpit). So I can halfway see the pilots' point.

[Edit: I mean, voice chit-chat. Just talking to each other. That gets recorded for pilots, and not for software engineers, no matter how long they keep our (text) chats for. Stuff gets said in person, by voice, that would never get typed out in a chat.]

I would be shocked if most companies are not maintaining long duration archives of employee emails, Slack, Teams, whatever medium.

Chat logs are tiny.

I’d be shocked if most companies are retaining these logs longer than the legally mandated minimum. This kind of information is radioactive from a legal perspective. Slack and Teams even advertise automated deletion as a feature.

Long-duration archives can be used against the company in a lawsuit - whoever's suing you would love to get decades of material to look through to help make their case.

As such, it's a large liability, and most companies retain those sorts of records for the minimum amount of time acceptable by law/regulation/customary expectations.

The equivalent of what you described is archiving your outputs. In flight, that would be a pilot's flight control inputs. That seems entirely uninvasive.

The equivalent of an always-on cockpit voice recorder would be... screen recording all of your digital devices during working hours? And, turn a mic on just to be safe?

It's not just my work output, though.

I'm a programmer on a team with other programmers, many of us remote.

We're not standing around a water-cooler talking. We're on team chats. We're reply-all'ing to email-chains. We're sharing memes. Half the time we talk across chat when we're sitting in the same room.

These aren't formal design docs or code output [the analogy to flight controls], this is our water-cooler talk, and it can all be subpoenaed in a variety of situations, to be read into court record and taken out of context for the rest of time.

That sounds like a fair point.

But are all zoom calls required to be archived, specifically in the medical device industry?

Certainly you have the option to make a phone call to a teammate, or walk over to someone if not remote, and say something without any record. Don't you?

Which, if a company has a policy of recording all work communications, sounds a bit like you're bypassing the monitoring systems in place.

Mind you, that is how people mostly work anyway. Even if I generally trust an employer to not be intrusively monitoring my communications, for anything sensitive I'm ideally going to talk in person or failing that, at least go with a personal cell call.

I mean, a pilot subject to constant audio recording could learn ASL, or scribble notes on a piece of paper, or whisper in someone's ear.

But we aren't talking about how to circumvent monitoring. We're talking about working when your idle socializing (while working) is monitored and logged.

Logged for 25 hours anyway. Stuck in a box in the airplane, that can only reasonably be opened by a technical crew.

I could deal with it if my laptop did that.

I think this thread started with a suggestion to permanently log and archive it though, the 25 hour part is less controversial

The proposal was that it would be automatically uploaded and searchable by corporate.

Yes, and talks between air traffic control and pilots are recorded.

Would you be okay with a recorder being beside your desk at all times? Catching every conversation, even personal ones?

Currently it's your choice to participate in sending memes over email. You also have the choice to walk over and have a private conversation.

Would this be any different from walking out of the cockpit to have a private conversation?

Pilot's shouldn't be encouraged to walk out of the cockpit mid flight, also after 9/11 all cockpit doors are locked during flight

> Eh, as a software engineer, every piece of text I produce -- from chat to email to memes -- is sitting around, archived and backed up, for years if not longer, waiting to be combed through and potentially taken out of context.

If this is true your legal team is committing malpractice.

You have no way of knowing this is the case unless you know where they work, the industry they operate in, the country they live in, the country their employer is domiciled in, and what agreements they've signed prior to and during employment.

True I made an assumption and skipped the qualifiers. That’s how I keep my comment word count below 450,000.

If you know the qualifiers will put your word count above 450k, maybe it’s not a very applicable comment?

Ok I’ll keep it down to 449,999.

Will you too?

How about instead of that nonsense we just have a reasonable conversation and assume best intentions?

It's hard to have a reasonable discussion when someone flippantly says an entire legal team is committing malpractice when talking about something they have no way of knowing anything about.

More akin to doctors and nurse rooms to be monitored which sounds fair.

Sounds like you will be a big fan of Neuralink Archive®!

But seriously, why did you skip over the software devs? Their errors could kill many more people than a bad doctor.

Because software dev work is certified and doctors/nurses are allowed to do whatever they want - starting with patient abuse and ending with drug and alcohol abuse.

Right now tons of public activity is monitored already but almost in all cases it's to catch customer abuse and never for business abuse. Monitoring everything 100% will become one of the greatest equalisers. Only people rejecting this are people in abusive power.

All the software deverrors that could kill people are already logged.

Social media has a way higher impact on human well being than aviation safety; maybe we should record all idle chatter and boardroom meetings of people working at these companies to ascertain liability when we finally realize they're akin to tobacco companies.

Why do you think it's needed to record all conversations to "keep proper tabs"? That's purely a gut feeling based on no data at all.

Aviation is by far the safest form of transportation. In the last 10 years of data (2012-2021) there were a total of 2 passenger fatalities on US airlines across several billion passengers for that time period [1].

If you want to start recording workplaces to improve safety, there are a lot of industries to look at before aviation.

[1]. https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...

> If you want to start recording workplaces to improve safety, there are a lot of industries to look at before aviation.

This is irrelevant to the discussion about recording pilots.

We already looked at policing. Police unions have a similar stance about body-cams? They are more invasive because they follow officers to the bathroom, and I am sure they're are safety/effectivenes stats that argue those are unnecessary.

Most civilians don't seem to have much sympathy.

Police unions indeed have similar objections. That's why police officers can turn their cameras on and off themselves, so they are not recorded when talking to a colleague or going to the bathroom: https://www.engadget.com/police-reform-bill-body-cameras-215...

Coincidentally, this is also why those cameras get "accidentally" turned off quite a lot whenever a use of force is about to occur.

I've often thought we should record all surgeries so that the patient can view them later. Wouldn't you want to know what is done to your body while you're under anesthesia? Of course surgeons will fight this, but aren't we entitled to know what happens to our bodies?

Even just regular doctor appointments. People are paying hundreds of dollars for 5 minutes of a doctors’ time, and they have no way to have someone double check if a doctor did or did not check something they should have.

I have looked at my kids’ pediatrician visit summaries, and they will state “doctor did this and that”, when I know for a fact the doctor did not. So I have to send a mychart message to document that the doctor did not do those things.

Now, I understand that excessive liability is probably driving doctors to do unnecessary things and so 95% of the time, there is no ill intent, but rather shrewd judgment of not wasting time, however writing (or copy pasting) a false visit summary is not the answer.

I have never tried recording a doctor visit. Is that something a doctor would would resist?

Without a doubt they would object, based just on signage I've seen at the doctor's office. Also I think it would run the risk of appearing like you're a litigious nut.

Note: All of this is U.S. perspective, I have no idea about healthcare anywhere else.

Given how hard it is to even find half-decent doctors even taking new patients, or having appointments available this quarter let alone soon, the doctor likely doesn't need you nearly as much as you probably need a doctor. They're going to be fully booked even if they ask you to leave and decline to be filmed, so they don't have any reason to consent to it. This is one place where the "try to make the customer happy" conventional wisdom about transactional relationships seems to not apply one iota.

This is already a thing. My grandfather got a video of his cataract surgery. A friend of mine got a video of his arthroscopic knee repair.

Then every software company should have every software engineer recorded at all times, as everything we work on is composed together in ways that hold dramatic sway over others lives.

I'd like to point out that one thing the tech industry is bad about is figuring out which technology to definitely not build. In fact, we've collectively resisted any attempt at so doing.

> This is our workplace, so you would be recording every conversation, also any idle chat of which there is quite a lot in cruise flight.

My workplace is my laptop, and I’m fairly certain that it records more than the airplane does. I certainly have no expectation of privacy while using it. Any meeting is recorded regardless of what is being said.

I’m sure my casual conversations would be if anyone felt I said anything valuable while muttering at my screen.

Not saying that’s great. Just saying that airline staff may currently have more privacy than most.

If the concern is privacy, then access should be the focus, not time.

So long as the recording is properly encrypted, and the access is properly managed, privacy will be preserved.

If those things aren't true, then there is a privacy violation, regardless of the 2 hour time constraint.

And what are your thoughts on police body cams?

Not th0mas88, but my thoughts: police body cams are a whole different story.

For one police officers are often able to turn on and off recording themselves, so it becomes as much of a protection for them as for everyone else. That is: if they are good police officers.

Secondly, unlike pilots, the police force in many countries does not have a stellar track record.

Edit: I do have some concerns. Yes, police brutality absolutely exists. But there also seems to exist a subset of the population - also represented here - who think police can be like superman and whenever they aren't that's because they are evil and enjoy harming innocents.

Police body cams are not "always on", the officer turns the camera on when they're interacting with the public and turn it off when they're in their car talking to a colleague: https://www.engadget.com/police-reform-bill-body-cameras-215...

So I guess they had similar objections to being recorded 24x7 and that was accommodated in the rules around body cams.

I can't follow the logic of how a recording is not stressful in the two hours it is stored, but then suddenly becomes stressful when it has been stored for 2+ hours?

Then you lack imagination. Perpetual recording has a chilling effect on communication.

Imagine you knew every on-the-clock interaction you had with a colleague was being stored away someplace that an unspecified number of people had access to as "needed." I'm pretty sure most developers here would object pretty strongly to such an arrangement (and would probably get onto ways to circumvent it).

>Imagine you knew every on-the-clock interaction you had with a colleague was being stored away someplace

Storing something for two hours is still storing it. The point was why is it bad if it is listen to for X minutes in a month, but okay if it is listen to for X minutes today? I can see no reason at all why two hours is okay if five isn't. I could understand if the argument was that nothing should be stored at all.

The issue is the difference between 2 hours on board the airplane and forever with corporate access.

> The point was why is it bad if it is listen to for X minutes in a month, but okay if it is listen to for X minutes today?

That wasn't the point and the problem is who is listening, why, and what they may do with the information.

That wasn't the point.

What can you say that I can hear on a recording that would stress you out if I listen in 3 hours but not if I listen after 1 hour? Is 2 hours okay but 2,5 is perpetual suddenly? That's a strange hill to die on. Zero hours make sense. 2 and no more or less seems ... strange. Why 2 and not 3? 33? 0,3?

> That wasn't the point.

Actually yes, it is the point. As has already been exhaustively pointed out in this thread the issue is the difference between two hours on the airplane that auto-erase and perpetual recording available to the company for whatever purpose they can dream up.

> Is 2 hours okay but 2,5 is perpetual suddenly?

That's not what the word "perpetual" means. "Perpetual" means "forever" as in "we never delete these recordings".

Don't put words in my mouth. OP very clearly said:

>"This is a proposal from the NTSB to the FAA to raise the CVR recording time from 2 hours to 25 hours, in line with ICAO."

You are arguing two hours is fine, but 25 hours is "perpetual recording". That is a strawman.

Does anyone have privacy at work outside the restrooms?

Assuming you're talking about a physical workplace? Yes... most places.

When I go into the office to meet with customers or whatever, there aren't cameras and microphones everywhere. I can use a personal cell phone (which is all I have these days anyway). And, honestly, for something personal but not in any way getting into legal issues, I have no problem communicating over chat or a video call.

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