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.
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.