American Airlines

9 Pages 2235 Words

Introduction
The National Transportation Board has recommended to the Federal Aviation Administration that all FAR Part 121, 125, and 135 passenger-carrying aircraft be equipped with cockpit video recorders, cockpit voice recorders and digital flight data recorders (Rimmer, 2000). The use of flight data information has been very useful to the National Transportation Safety Board for solving countless aircraft accidents and mishaps. The recent surge for the upgraded equipment, especially the cockpit video recorders, stems from the crashes of ValuJet Flight 592 in the Florida Everglades, Swissair Flight 111, which crashed off the coast of Halifax, and more recently the EgyptAir 990 crash (“Safety Board Favors Cameras For Cockpits,” 2000). The current equipment used in the aircraft today is the Cockpit Voice Recorder and the Flight Data Recorder. The cockpit voice recorder records the radio transmissions between the pilots and the air traffic controllers who guide the planes to their designated areas in the air and on the ground. The cockpit voice recorder also records the sounds inside the cockpit between pilots, stall warning signals, engine noise, landing gear extension and retraction, weather briefs, and any other abnormal noises (Barker, 1999). The flight data recorder monitors certain parameters of the actual airplane such as the altitude, airspeed, compass heading, vertical acceleration and time (Maharry, 2000). Definition The National Transportation Safety Board wants to upgrade existing flight data recorders and implement cockpit video recorders for safety reasons and to help solve commercial airline crashes. The airline pilots are against the idea of the cockpit recorders due to the fact that they will be on camera at all times and feel that this is a breach of privacy and the film could be leaked to the media (Sher, 2000). Affected Principles The National Transportation Safety Board has cited that with the help of the cock...