Comment by eternityforest
Comment by eternityforest 7 hours ago
Could they add cameras to solve this issue?
Comment by eternityforest 7 hours ago
Could they add cameras to solve this issue?
Having cameras pointed at the engines/wings like rearview mirrors would be helpful. It does not add that much workload if you take a quick glance in the “mirror” and figure out what the problem exactly is.
And now we have technology that allows for cameras everywhere to give a better situational awareness across all critical aircraft surfaces and systems.
It is going to take a little bit of adjusting to, but it will help improve safety in a tremendous way.
This would need to be tested. There's a lot going on already during normal take-offs. Now you're in a situation where the engine fire alarm is going off, probably a few other alarms, you got so many messages on your display that it only shows the most urgent one, you're taking quick glances at 50 points in the cockpit already.
And how would the cameras even work? Are the pilots supposed to switch between multiple camera feeds, or do we install dozens of screens? And then what, they see lots of black smoke on one camera, does that really tell them that much more than the ENG FIRE alert blaring in the background?
Maybe this could help during stable flight, but in this situation, when the pilots were likely already overloaded and probably had only a few seconds to escape this situation - if it was possible at all - I can't imagine it being helpful.
You know how the tail camera works on the new planes? Something like that, which can be far away from the wings, but get the full picture. Am I saying it's the solution for everything? No. But after you go through the memory committed items during an emergency, you can take a look outside and be like "ah, I see better what the problem is".
If we don't try to see how it goes, we won't know if it is a good idea or not.
It'd certainly need more thought put into it than just showing the camera view from the entertainment system. Either just one camera on the tail pointed forwards, so you have one single camera that can show the whole plane, or two cameras in the front, one pointed at each wing. Two cameras is worse than one, but they are less likely to be affected by smoke or blood splatters or whatever. Maybe give each pilot one of the camera feeds. And you'd have to fit a dedicated screen for the video feed so pilots don't need to switch through screens in an emergency.
It'd take lots of testing and engineering. But especially in cases where you have multiple warnings going off I imagine that a quick view at an exterior camera can often give you a clearer/faster indication of the situation
> Having cameras pointed at the engines/wings like rearview mirrors would be helpful.
Helpful in what way? What are the pilots going to do with the information?
They won't have to rely on cabin crew description of what they see over the wings or have to send one of the pilots to take a look (see UA1175).
They surely can and this has been done. On one the flights that I took with Turkish Airlines they had a few video streams from different sides of the airplane. One was from the top of the tail and you could see the entire plane.
Now... not sure how much that is helpful in this kind of emergency, they really didn't have time to do much.
I'm not sure they usually have the views on screen in the cockpit in flight, even if available (and an old MD-11 freighter won't have the cameras in the first place). The picture of an A380 cockpit (on the ground) on Wikipedia does show the tail view on a screen, but its on the screen normally used for main instruments. With an A380 that had an uncontained engine failure causing various bits of havok (Qantas 32?) IIRC the passengers could see a fuel leak on the in flight entertainment screens, but they had to tell the crew as AFAIK they didn't have access to the view in the cockpit in flight.
During engine failure / fire situations, I would expect that pilots are likely to be too busy to have any time left over for peering at a video feed, trying to assess the state of the wing.
In emergencies, information overload tends to make things worse, not better.