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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Couldn’t you say about population mass surveillance too?

> 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?

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