There's no impediment to any aircraft manufacturer or any airline to develop their own superior system, and augment what's required. Surely, the case could be made that it's helpful mitigating even just future revenue catastrophes?
Pilot unions actively lobby against cameras in the cockpit. Some airlines would be in violation of their contracts if they bought more cockpit monitoring systems.
It isn’t an entirely unfair gripe. The AF 447 debacle was down to “pilot error” officially. The cause of the crash was that one pilot was commanding the aircraft incorrectly and the other pilots weren’t aware because the dual controls in an Airbus dont mirror each other like in all other aircraft. The real question for me is how do you design critical control systems so poorly that one person can be flying the plane in a configuration they aren’t aware of (the stick on an Airbus will react differently to the same input differently based on conditions) , and the other two people in the cockpit aren’t able to even see this. This is a design issue.
The vast majority of incidents are brought to conclusion on why it happened. Even the one article uses as an example. I was watching a bunch of post-mortems of various accidents and just about the only thing that came up when it comes to problems with black boxes is:
* That some of them recorded voice cabin sound for too short (which was fixed in later ones but there are still some old planes flying
* That the cockpit voice recorder recorded in a loop and someone forgot to pull the fuse after accident and it got overwritten.
And overall even those would add very little to investigation.
It has simply become good enough and still are incrementally improved.
Even if you're dodging ~all the regulations which specify the current Black Boxes by adding a separate, independent system (and you'll still face a lot of regulations)...there still are three obvious impediments - (1) development costs, (2) unit costs, and (3) legal liability. Vs. the incredibly-long-odds theory that something might happen, eventually, where your new & better system would be a substantial benefit.
(BTW, my experience is that "the case could be made for X" is a polite way of saying "a valid technical argument could be made in favor of X...but in the bigger picture X is clearly the wrong theory / engineering choice / business decision".)
And, given the rarity of aircraft crashes, the benefit to some small subset of the industry adopting an incrementally better system is probably pretty much nil.
dghlsakjg|2 years ago
It isn’t an entirely unfair gripe. The AF 447 debacle was down to “pilot error” officially. The cause of the crash was that one pilot was commanding the aircraft incorrectly and the other pilots weren’t aware because the dual controls in an Airbus dont mirror each other like in all other aircraft. The real question for me is how do you design critical control systems so poorly that one person can be flying the plane in a configuration they aren’t aware of (the stick on an Airbus will react differently to the same input differently based on conditions) , and the other two people in the cockpit aren’t able to even see this. This is a design issue.
FabHK|2 years ago
Presumably they would have seen it if they had looked. But they didn't feel it.
ilyt|2 years ago
* That some of them recorded voice cabin sound for too short (which was fixed in later ones but there are still some old planes flying
* That the cockpit voice recorder recorded in a loop and someone forgot to pull the fuse after accident and it got overwritten.
And overall even those would add very little to investigation.
It has simply become good enough and still are incrementally improved.
- [1] https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot/videos
bell-cot|2 years ago
(BTW, my experience is that "the case could be made for X" is a polite way of saying "a valid technical argument could be made in favor of X...but in the bigger picture X is clearly the wrong theory / engineering choice / business decision".)
ghaff|2 years ago
stevehawk|2 years ago
TylerE|2 years ago
When they DON'T move at glacial pace you get the 737 MAX.