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Comment by DidYaWipe | Hacker News Reader

It's mystifying that any airport with commercial service doesn't have cameras with a full view of every runway recording 100% of the time.

You can't steal a catalytic converter without being on video. We have webcams placed behind eagles' nests in our national parks. Yet somehow we have no recordings of plane crashes at our airports.

Then of course there's the lack of cameras on the planes themselves...

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Why do you assume no footage exists? Why do you assume that any footage the tower has should be released to the public immediately?

Well, it seems that there have been several crashes over the last few years where no on-site footage surfaced... whether there's any of this one or not.

Footage existing and footage being released to the public are two different things.

I understand there is a public Voyeur interest in seeing crashes, but how does releasing footage of accidents aid investigation or safety outcomes?

It can aid pilots, for one thing. I watch air-safety/accident-analysis videos all the time. They are often extremely informative and promote a safety-oriented mindset and the refreshment of one's commitment to procedure.

I also read scuba-diving accident reports. They reinforce best practices that I also explain to others in the context of what I've seen in said reports over and over.

Watching the various yt vids with pilots etc, I am considerably less anxious about flying.

Also a good point!

Considering how much effort it takes the NTSB to reconstruct the chain of events from the crash site and flight data recorder, any high-resolution video could be very valuable. In particular I think all airliners should have 4K "dashcams" considering how inexpensive the technology now is.

Crashes aside, a high-res Tower view would also make a great live webcam for enthusiasts to watch while listening to LiveATC.

A view just out the front of the plane wouldn't do much to help crash investigations and one of the big reasons they don't is you have to make a large enough storage resilient enough it can reasonably survive a crash. Most crashes are no where near this gentle.

Far more useful would be an interior cockpit view showing the crew and the actions they were taking but a lot of that is recorded to the FDR on newer planes too.

True. A better external placement would be a wide angle tail-mounted camera that can film the entire aircraft from the rear. Some airlines (e.g. Emirates) already have this live view available on the infotainment.

It happens to be that another pilot from a plane waiting to take off form the very same runway was filming the approach [1].

Purely by chance we have HD footage. It does make a huge difference and I agree with the sentiment that this would make flying safer.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGNgCI0MC68/

That's the first clear footage that I've seen (i.e. from an angle not obscured by smoke). To me it looks like the plane touched down with a slight tilt to the right, then the rear landing gear buckled (possibly -- those might be snow dunes obscuring the actual position of the runway) causing the right wing to hit the ground and break off. Then the plane continued to slide on its side for a second before tipping upside down.

Others are saying the plane hit the ground quite hard, I have no frame of reference to judge that.

Well... we have door-shaped footage that might be HD vertically, because he had his camera turned the wrong way.

There’s a video posted elsewhere in this discussion [0].

Looks like the plane landed incredibly hard and the gear buckled. Extreme wind shear?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1is1qoy/video_of_...

Thanks for the link.

Yes, that's technically video I guess, but it's trash and doesn't look like the camera was set up to capture takeoffs and landings. More like a utility shed and road... at '90s webcam frame rates and quality.

Hahah, wow, who was offended by those easily-verified observations?

They're obvious hyperbole complaining about how you can't immediately have access to high res, high frame rate footage of a disaster with casualties.

Maybe people think you are kind of creepy for being so insistent (and hyperbolically so)?

What are you talking about? I merely criticized THIS shitty footage, which is so poor that you can't tell what happened to the plane. Useless.

Maybe you're replying to the wrong person. Otherwise, the only hyperbolic statement is your own.

Any such cameras would have to be operating in a full range of weather, temperature, and lighting conditions, and would need to have power/data infrastructure run out to it around/under runways. Plus you'd need dozens of the things, all of the networking infrastructure to support them.....this isn't going to come out looking like Hollywood. Have you ever worked with security cameras or footage anywhere?

That link seems to have been taken down by reddit mods now.

That post was removed by the /r/aviation mods so (at least on mobile) it can't be viewed directly on the new UI. But if you switch to old.reddit.com it's still there.

> Looks like the plane landed incredibly hard and the gear buckled. Extreme wind shear?

Quality is not good enough to tell for sure, but to me, looks like wind shear causing a tail strike followed by gear buckling

the Navy pilot jokes showed up fast in that thread

"You can't steal a catalytic converter without being on video." Wait! Tell us about your experiences with catalytic converters!

Also, I've flown a lot of Korean Airlines flights where they have front, down and side view cameras that you can watch on the entertainment console. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before more airlines adopt it.

Thieves stole mine in 2020. It was a Mitsubishi Carisma from 1996. They steal them because it’s fast and they contain expensive metals.

There are videos of thieves stealing them on YouTube, but we don’t have any footage.

This is about 20 years old tech.

Most cabins today have CCTV cameras on board.

Others have answered this well, but a more interesting question to me is why we don’t have video of the flight deck recorded on flight recorders. We have the technology to do that reliably.

It’s an interesting privacy concern really. Pilots don’t like the idea, somewhat understandably, who wants to be watched at work every minute of their day? But then it’s also a safety benefit and maybe that’ll win out eventually (this question does keep getting raised on certain crashes).

Given that control inputs and maneuvers are all captured by the data recorder, what would you expect to gain from video of the cockpit?

Simple: additional context.

There is footage.

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