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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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