Originally Posted by
Paren
Agreed. Safety should come first.
However, ethics is not something that is dealt with easily. Furthermore, (and perhaps especially in the case of BA), may pilots be afraid of their employer using the footage as an excuse for disciplinary action etc?
This is incredibly wide of the mark. BA does not have a culture of vicious management seeking to punish pilots for errors. Rather the "just culture" would only seek to punish those who deliberately and wilfully, for no safety based reason, step outside the rules and thence cause damage.
Rather it is more to do with rapacious lawyers and prosecutors, one only has to look at certain accidents in countries such as France where the actions of prosecutors have hindered accident investigations, to see where the reservations of pilots come from re cameras in the flight deck.
When cameras are installed in every office of every CEO, magistrate, policeman, lawyer, accountant, financial advisor, currency trader, worker in the wider finance industry or e-commerce etc etc etc then you might start to see a softening if this attitude.
In many countries prosecutors are elected officials, and so there is always a political aspect to policing and prosecutions (thankfully largely kept out of aviation accident investigation) in less progressive cultures the idea of cameras is downright dangerous.
In this country one only has to think back to the Hunter crash and the clamour to allow a prosection and police access to crash data even before the AAIB had finished the early parts of their investigation to see the danger.
Furthermore flight deck cameras add little detail to the extensive data provided by modern data systems, but they will add a little titillation to viewers of Youtube et al who would publish the final moments of a pilots life, which would be devastating to their families.