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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is an argument against any change that involves unknowns. I see it often, and I absolutely hate it.
Everything worked out in this case but that’s because every incident is a lesson.
This means airlines will have a smaller pool of less desirable / qualified pilots to choose from.
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.
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.
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...
This is irrelevant to the discussion about recording pilots.
Most civilians don't seem to have much sympathy.
Should all medical device software developers have the entirety of their working lives be archived in a similar manner?
First they came for, etc, but they came for me a long time ago.
[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.]
Chat logs are tiny.
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 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
I could deal with it if my laptop did that.
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.
If this is true your legal team is committing malpractice.
Will you too?
How about instead of that nonsense we just have a reasonable conversation and assume best intentions?
But seriously, why did you skip over the software devs? Their errors could kill many more people than a bad doctor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
If ICAO can require keeping 25 hours why should a crew get to choose 2?
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.