NTSB Urges Using Video Cameras in Cockpits

The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday called for video cameras in airline cockpits, saying that such technology would have helped determine the causes of the recent Alaska Airlines and EgyptAir crashes.

But the recommendation touched off a battle over the privacy of pilots, who warned that cameras would bring both Big Brother and tabloid TV into the cockpit. Cameras are unneeded and intrusive, they argued, and lurid crash video well could fall into the hands of the media.

NTSB Chairman Jim Hall recommended that cameras be required in all jetliners and commuter aircraft within five years, in addition to the voice and flight data recorders already in place.

“We should not further delay the implementation of available technology that may help us more quickly determine the probable cause of accidents and . . . prevent future accidents,” Hall said at a congressional hearing on the EgyptAir investigation.

The NTSB recommendation would have to be adopted by the Federal Aviation Administration as a government regulation. The FAA, which accepts about 80% of the safety board’s recommendations, already has asked a technical advisory group to study the issue.

Unlike the pilots, the airline industry already uses cameras in some training simulators and sees them as the wave of the future. Airline executives even have suggested that rowdy passengers--not only crew members--could be targets of video surveillance.

“I think we will see video in cockpits and perhaps other parts of the aircraft as well,” Bob Baker, vice chairman of American Airlines, said at a safety conference last week. “Clearly the technology is available, but we have to do a little more work with the unions.”

The airlines and the agencies are studying several ways to address pilot concerns, including framing the video image so that only the control panel and the pilots’ hands are visible. Also under review are severe penalties for unauthorized release of the video or even encryption of digital images so they can only be read with special equipment.

Thomas E. McSweeny, the FAA’s top regulatory official, called video recorders “a very important medium to evaluate” but was noncommittal about his agency’s ultimate decision, adding that “many questions and issues . . . will need to be addressed.”

European air safety regulators are developing specifications for cockpit video recorders. McSweeny said that if the FAA wants to speed up the process it could simply adopt those standards, which are expected to be released later this year.

Hall said that video would have been of critical importance in the investigation of the EgyptAir Flight 990 crash, widely suspected to have been caused by a suicidal co-pilot. Flight 990 fell into the Atlantic off New England on Oct. 31, killing all 217 aboard.

While withholding judgment on the suicide theory, Hall said that available evidence points to “a deliberate action on the part of one of the crew members” as the cause of the disaster.

A video “black box” could have shown whether one of the co-pilots was alone at the controls when the Boeing 767 began its fatal plunge and whether there was a struggle for control of the aircraft as it descended at near-supersonic speeds.

Likewise, in the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, Hall said, video would have helped investigators better understand crew members’ maneuvers to keep the plane under control as they prepared for an emergency landing in Los Angeles. Flight 261 went down in the Pacific off Anacapa Island on Jan. 31, killing all 88 aboard. The leading theory in that crash involves problems with the MD-83’s stabilizer, a wing-like structure on the tail that controls the up-and-down pitch of the nose.

The NTSB has developed a simulation of a cockpit video, which can be found in Hall’s testimony on its Web site at https://www.ntsb.gov/speeches/jhc000411.htm

Bernard Loeb, the NTSB’s head of aviation safety, conceded that the agency would probably be able to determine the cause of most crashes without video but that a visual record would make the investigation much easier.

“I don’t think we have ever failed to solve an accident because of lack of video, but I do believe it has taken longer, at greater cost to the taxpayers,” he said. The EgyptAir investigation already has cost the NTSB $13 million, and total expenses are projected at $17 million.

However, pilots say they are unpersuaded by such arguments.

“We strongly disagree that video monitoring of flight deck crews will make any contribution at all toward increased air safety,” said Duane Woerth, president of the Air Line Pilots Assn. “Cockpit video is an egregious invasion of privacy for minimal, if any, safety data.”

Pilots dread the possibility that video of a crash could find its way onto the nightly news. Cockpit voice recordings, shielded by law from disclosure in the United States, have been leaked to the media overseas.

“It would just be a matter of time before the world shares firsthand the cockpit environment in the seconds before a disaster,” Woerth said. “Will the release of this information . . . enhance safety? Would such a development be acceptable to the world’s pilots? Absolutely not.”

Hall said that the objections are “legitimate concerns that need to be addressed.”

The impulse to enhance airplane safety after a big crash is not new. Following a series of crashes in the early 1990s, the NTSB recommended, and the FAA approved, improvements in flight data recorders. The black boxes are used to monitor 11 control settings, and some now can record as many as 88.