Vreflect.com..................Miscllaneous(Cockpit Cameras)

Cockpit Cameras
By James E Hall

Airline accidents today, like the recent American Airlinescrash in Queens, N.Y., can puzzle safety experts. They strugglefor months, even years, often unable to explain fully a flightsproblems or how the pilots reacted. Video cameras in the cockpit could help answer such critical questions.

Putting video cameras on airplanes might seem a settled matter. Sept.11proved

the need for a visual record inside the airplane, and some airlines are testing security cameras for passenger cabins. Flight attendants have endorsed the idea of cabin cameras. But putting cameras in the cockpit is controversial. Pilots' unions consider them an invasion of workplace privacy. They fear cockpit videos of a crash will be splashed across television screens. These are legitimate concerns that can be addressed with legal protections. They are not reasons to leave safety investigators hampered. Flight attendants and passengers are willing to accept less privacy to make air travel more secure. Pilots should accept less privacy in the cockpit to make flying safer.
Airline accidents are getting harder to solve. Decades of good safety work have eliminated the most obvious threats. Today, an airliner crash typically results from a chain of subtle errors and flaws, each minor on its own but deadly in combination. Airliners are also far more complicated than they were 20 years ago. They use intricate computer systems to fly and video displays to tell pilots what is going on. The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder; the "black boxes , cannot capture all of the computer and video-display information. Black boxes are invaluable in revealing what the plane and its pilots were doing before a crash. But they do not capture hand, foot and body movements as pilots move controls and switches. They don't record all of the problems pilots face during an emergency, like fire or smoke. This kind of information, captured on video recorders, can be essential in a crash investigation.
For example, take the 1994 crash of a Boeing 737 near Pittsburgh. Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board, which I led at the time, focused on problems with side-to-side control, based on their probe of a similar crash in 1991. The key question was: Did the pilots cause the crash or did the airplane's control system fail? Neither black box could answer that question. The flight recorder told what had happened to the airplane, but not why. The voice recorder captured grunts and exclamations as the pilots wrestled with a problem, but nothing about the nature of that problem. It took four years for the safety board to conclude that a control- system flaw was responsible for both crashes.
Other investigations have been hampered by a dearth of information from the cockpit, including the 1998 Swissair crash off Nova Scotia, the 1999 EgyptAir crash off Nantucket and the 2000 Alaska Airlines crash off Southern California. The current American Airlines investigation again raises the question of who or what was controlling the aircraft's side-to-side movement, just as in the Pittsburgh case.
The safety board has called for requiring video recorders in airliners no later than 2005. The Federal Aviation Administration should enact that requirement now. Video recorders can become one of our most valuable investigative tools. Without them, we are shortchanging the flying public.
The author served as chairman and acting chairman of the National Transnortation Safety Board of USA from June 1994 to January 2001.

Hollywood movies and reality
If someone had gone to scrip resem ing scenario of this week'smurderous hijackings and attacks on US soil, they probably would have been sent packing. Too unbelievable, most studio execs would have said.Yes some recent Hollywood fare has come close to Tuesday's attacks on New York and Washington.DC, which destroyed the World Trade Center's Twin Towers and blasted a hole in the Pentagon.In 1998, "The Siege , starring Denzel Washington, Annette Bening and Bruce Willis, follows a fictitious group of Arab terrorist who attack New York's FBI headquarters, city buses and packed Broadway theater.Many Arab Americans objected to the 2Qth Century Fox film and its stereotypical images of Arabs as fanatical terrorists ready to die to inflict murder and mayhem an all things American."Given how vulnerable our cities are to terrorism, and how vulnerable Arab-Americans are to defamation, was this movie really necessary.. .The prejudicial attitudes embodied in the film are insidious, like the anti- Semitism that infected fiction and journalism in the 1930s , not just in Germany, but in Britain and America.In "The Peacemaker , a 1997 Dream Works 5KG release starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, a Serbian terrorist plans to detonate a stolen nuclear weapon in New York City.In "Arlington Road. (1999) a professor of terrorism (Jeff Bridges) suspects that a pleasant couple who have moved next door (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) are hiding something.