With every crash, we learn valuable lessons that are applied to prevent or mitigate future crashes. Just a few months ago when a National Air Cargo 747 crashed in Afghanistan, video proved to be a very useful took in gaining valuable insight into the crash. While video records may not always be the determining factor in finding the root cause of a crash, they certainly can not hurt. All that is currently missing is a physical camera in the flight deck. While recording the video on board is quite feasible, the real-time uploaded of such information is not at this point. Video compression has come a long way in that high resolution video does not require much memory, and much like a traditional car dash cam, video can be set to record over itself after a certain period of time. Technically speaking, it would most likely not take much to implement video recording on the existing flight data recorders. The camera selection screen on an Air France Airbus A380 A New York Times article from 2004 reads that investigators say there is a need for a third black box, a “cockpit video recorder - to complement the existing voice and data recorders.” However, due to privacy concerns from pilots and the concern about the added weight of such a device, a video black box never came to be. The matter of on board video recording crops up every now and then, but has not been in the spotlight of the National Transportation Safety Board since the early 2000s. This often forces investigators to search for amateur video that may have been recorded, but such videos tend to be shot from a distance. This information gap sometimes leaves investigators guessing when audio simply isn’t enough, such as with EgyptAir Flight 990, and SilkAir Flight 185. While the cockpit voice recorder captures audio from the flight deck, we still do not get a visual hint as to what occurred in the moments leading to a crash.

While black boxes may have gone digital and record much more than they used to, one critical item they do not yet record is on board video. Time after time, these “black boxes” help to unlock the mystery of crashes in ways that nothing else can. They have transitioned from an analog recording of a very small set of flight parameters, to advanced digital solid state recordings of over a hundred critical parameters and data points. Aircraft flight data and cockpit voice recorders have advanced dramatically in recent years.

Boeing 777 cockpit camera