The map shows the location of the Germanwings Flight 9525 that crashed on 3/24/2015. All 144 passengers and 6 crew aboard the flight were killed, likely instantly on impact. Several were Americans (though they were all people, so I'm not sure why we insist on adding that information to these types of stories), and the shockwave of the crash event has reverberated around the globe in a brisk fashion. There is a human cost to human action, which can be glossed over when we reduce casualties to simple numbers or we talk about how much the families are suing and who they are going after. Hopefully we can all take a step back and breathe and simply remember that there were real live people on that plane, with faults and foibles, dreams and abilities, and the world no longer gets the benefit of their life. Please pray for solace to those hurting, and for joy to come back to life swiftly. Tragedies are hard, and our memories can be long.
The media at large has focused on the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, and his medical history, motive, and the airline's culpability in their pilot's actions. Keeping in mind that this is an opinion piece, I feel that many of these questions, and their answers, are important. They have the potential to lead us to a more secure future. To some this is necessary, to others the very thought of being more secure means their privacy is less so. To most it is inevitable. That debate, and similar ones around the web and the world are just beginning to heat up, and you might catch me writing about them periodically but not today.
Today, as I ate breakfast and watched the news, a little ticker on the bottom of the screen mentioned that just about everywhere, rules/regulations/laws were being quickly enacted to prevent any person from being left alone in a cockpit mid-flight. Some flights are long, and may require a bathroom break. It doesn't take a genius to extrapolate that a flight attendant will need to step into the cockpit if a pilot needs to have a break (and yes, they should be allowed to have breaks. It's not an easy job, and you want someone fresh and composed when the routine fails to be so routine). The other option is requiring three pilots. When planes were bigger, people were smaller, and cockpits were less automated, it was standard industry practice to have a pilot, co-pilot, and flight officer/engineer all manning the cockpit. The flight officer's job was to not only provide critical backup, but to manage communications, flight plans, weather reports, and other tasks more administrative in nature but still necessary.
With the trend to move toward a more automated flight experience, many of the flight officer's tasks became more efficiently handled by a computer or more robust ground communication suites. The transition from three people into a cockpit to two happened relatively quickly, and now you really only see three people in the cockpit on transoceanic flights over eight hours because that is the flight time limit of a pilot with two pilots on board. So what do we do with these leaner cockpits? I'm honestly not sure, and I think at least putting another set of eyes in the cockpit is at the least a good idea. The unfortunate truth is that if someone in the position of trust of a pilot wants to bring a plane down they have pretty good odds of making it happen.
Okay, so no matter what we do, there will be bad eggs or misunderstood people put in positions they should not be in, that can cause great harm to people beyond themselves. It is a small mercy, but if 9/11 taught us a simple lesson, it is that God's law of physics rules the roost on this planet, and so putting that plane down in the mountains limited the catastrophe's scope. How do we do a better job of identifying high risk people in high risk scenarios to avoid these terrible events in general? We need data!
There are some proposals floating around the FAA's of the world stating that we should have cameras on airplanes. I don't want to wade into the public vs private debate today. Let's just say that I'm surprised it isn't something that already exists, especially in the cockpit. So here is an expansion on that nugget I saw in the news. If you are in a position of authority on this issue and you happen to be lost in my small corner of the internet, then feel free to take these proposals all the way to the top. It would be nice to be cited, but I doubt I'm the first to think of this and I don't need the attention - I just like to know if things I say or do have impact. So here is what I think (took us a while to get here, sorry):
Okay this is longer than I intended it to be, but I figured I should write this down before I forget about it. I have many other things I planned to do today, and I should get a move on. Thanks for reading and please forgive the simple spelling and grammar mistakes I may have made. It has been years since I was a writer competitively, and I feel super rusty.
Today, as I ate breakfast and watched the news, a little ticker on the bottom of the screen mentioned that just about everywhere, rules/regulations/laws were being quickly enacted to prevent any person from being left alone in a cockpit mid-flight. Some flights are long, and may require a bathroom break. It doesn't take a genius to extrapolate that a flight attendant will need to step into the cockpit if a pilot needs to have a break (and yes, they should be allowed to have breaks. It's not an easy job, and you want someone fresh and composed when the routine fails to be so routine). The other option is requiring three pilots. When planes were bigger, people were smaller, and cockpits were less automated, it was standard industry practice to have a pilot, co-pilot, and flight officer/engineer all manning the cockpit. The flight officer's job was to not only provide critical backup, but to manage communications, flight plans, weather reports, and other tasks more administrative in nature but still necessary.
With the trend to move toward a more automated flight experience, many of the flight officer's tasks became more efficiently handled by a computer or more robust ground communication suites. The transition from three people into a cockpit to two happened relatively quickly, and now you really only see three people in the cockpit on transoceanic flights over eight hours because that is the flight time limit of a pilot with two pilots on board. So what do we do with these leaner cockpits? I'm honestly not sure, and I think at least putting another set of eyes in the cockpit is at the least a good idea. The unfortunate truth is that if someone in the position of trust of a pilot wants to bring a plane down they have pretty good odds of making it happen.
Okay, so no matter what we do, there will be bad eggs or misunderstood people put in positions they should not be in, that can cause great harm to people beyond themselves. It is a small mercy, but if 9/11 taught us a simple lesson, it is that God's law of physics rules the roost on this planet, and so putting that plane down in the mountains limited the catastrophe's scope. How do we do a better job of identifying high risk people in high risk scenarios to avoid these terrible events in general? We need data!
There are some proposals floating around the FAA's of the world stating that we should have cameras on airplanes. I don't want to wade into the public vs private debate today. Let's just say that I'm surprised it isn't something that already exists, especially in the cockpit. So here is an expansion on that nugget I saw in the news. If you are in a position of authority on this issue and you happen to be lost in my small corner of the internet, then feel free to take these proposals all the way to the top. It would be nice to be cited, but I doubt I'm the first to think of this and I don't need the attention - I just like to know if things I say or do have impact. So here is what I think (took us a while to get here, sorry):
- All interior spaces (and some exterior) on all flights should be video and audio recorded. Storage is cheap, non-volatile, and getting cheaper and more robust with each passing second. I can think of very few barriers to entry of putting simple, webcam style cameras in every space of a plane that a human can go, and just recording it passively. There would be limits to how long footage should be kept. Say, 3 or 4 days worth of storage before it overwrites previous recordings. Cameras are cheap, and work well, power is not an issue on a plane, and you wouldn't even need the footage unless there was an issue you needed to review or investigate.
- That brings us to lock in. There needs to be a way to lock in footage in the event of an accident. You don't want the freak situation of the onboard computer still functioning and recording days after the crash because rescue/recovery personnel couldn't get to it in time. I expect the cameras to be destroyed, I expect the computer to be a wreck, and for there to be fire everywhere. But if a car knows when it has been in an accident and can call for help, then a similar solution can key a hard record function that prevents overwrites. If it wants to keep recording while it is in the mountains waiting for recovery, then fine, but do not allow it to overwrite the event that led it to the ground.
- Since we are talking about the destruction of most of the systems, let's look at one of the toughest things people have ever made: the black box. When there aren't tragedies to make us remember the human cost, the black box becomes a ubiquitous term meaning indestructible. It is not in fact indestructible but boy do we try to make it that way. So where do you think that we should store the A/V data being collected on flights? That's right - in the black box. 2 TB of data can be store on something the size of a thick postage stamp (not commercially available yet). You have to give the data the best shot of getting out to be analyzed. That's how we improve: review of data and iteration. So we need the data - make it survive as best you can.
- Offloading the data. Planes need fuel. They typically need passengers or cargo (yes this should be implemented on all commercial flights, not just passenger). Those exchanges take place in airports or facilities designed to pass things to and from the plane. How hard is it to plug in an ethernet cable or some other cable suite to the underside of a plane and in a matter of minutes (or more likely seconds) offload all the flight recorder data? This has many advantages and a couple I can rattle off include:
- Pilot performance review: couple this with the medical tests, the aptitude tests, and you start to build a pretty good idea about the character of a pilot in all situations they encounter. This could be used for reviews, prosecution, defense, training opportunities - you name it.
- Because storage is cheap, you can store an entire airline's A/V data in perpetuity if you want or you can put decadenal* limits on the storage. Whatever, I'm not that picky. You can't create enough data that will outpace our ability to store it in this fashion.
Okay this is longer than I intended it to be, but I figured I should write this down before I forget about it. I have many other things I planned to do today, and I should get a move on. Thanks for reading and please forgive the simple spelling and grammar mistakes I may have made. It has been years since I was a writer competitively, and I feel super rusty.
* decadonal - a word I made up to mean a time period measured in decades. It's silly but there you have it.
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