LONDON: Pilots should be filmed in the cockpit so that accidents can be investigated properly, International Air Transport Association (IATA) director-general Willie Walsh has said.
“I can see there is a strong argument now for the inclusion of video in the cockpit to assist in accident investigations,” Walsh said in his first remarks since the release of the preliminary investigation report on the June 12 Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner crash.
“We believe that any major incident or accident that takes place needs to be investigated fully and properly and reported so that everyone can benefit. Based on what little we know now, it is quite possible that a video recording in addition to the voice recording, would significantly assist the investigators conducting [the Air India] investigation,” Walsh, former chief executive of British Airways, said in Singapore on Wednesday.
“Videos are becoming important now as there have been so many crashes over the past few years,” a retired Boeing pilot captain who flew 737s internationally told TOI. “A video recording would answer all the questions about the Air India crash… People need answers.”
Pilots' unions are worried about privacy breaches and the videos being misused. President of the largest airline pilot union in the world, the Air Line Pilots Association, Int’l (ALPA), Capt Jason Ambrosi, told TOI: “ALPA has long recommended that any additional resources should be focused on enhancing current safety systems to record more data of a higher quality and improve pilot situational awareness by deploying readily available technology, like ADS-B in equipage, to prevent accidents, as opposed to video images, which are subject to misinterpretation and may lead investigators away from accurate conclusions. Flight deck image recorders will not improve safety and could impede it by diverting limited resources that could be used for more valuable safety enhancements. ALPA remains equally concerned as to how such proposed video recordings may be misused.”
In 2000, US National Transportation Safety Board chairman Jim Hall had urged the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to require all commercial US airliners to be equipped with cockpit video recorders.
An FAA spokesperson told TOI, “The FAA formed an Aviation Rulemaking Committee in Sept 2023 to provide suggestions for addressing these recommendations. The FAA expects to receive the committee’s report later this year and will carefully evaluate it.”