Cameras Being Deployed on Aircraft to Improve Safety, Security

Air Safety Week, June 9, 2003

The need for expanded coverage of the entire cabin also is pushing the technology. Mike Horne, managing director of AD Aerospace, a UK manufacturer of video surveillance equipment, said, "An attack won't start just outside the cockpit."

Moreover, he pointed to the rise in disruptive passenger incidents, in some cases involving outright attacks, as adding to the need for complete video coverage of the cabin. Horne pointed out that the FAA investigated 314 incidents in 2002, and three Japanese airlines surveyed that same year posted 570 such incidents. These numbers show that the problem may be vastly under-reported. It is "hard to believe," Horne said, that Japan with its smaller airline industry would have nearly twice as many incidents. With pilots locked in the cockpit, the flight attendants now must face these incidents by themselves. Horne cited a number of "potentially dangerous and certainly costly incidents" where a video recording would have been extremely useful in subsequent court proceedings.

Court proceedings often devolve into the flight attendant's word against the alleged perpetrators. A video recording of the event, Horne pointed out, would help to successfully prosecute these cases.

Technical challenges

"Putting video cameras on aircraft is not a trivial thing," Horne said. As in the case of FDR/CVR boxes, an AIR would have to be hardened against shock, heat, water penetration and such. As in the case of its FDR/CVR cousins, the AIR would need a recorder independent power supply (RIPS) to guard against gaps in the data The RIPS would have to kick in within 50 milliseconds of the aircraft losing power, said Jim Elliott, the marketing manager for Michigan-based Smiths Aerospace Electronic Systems. Elliott said it is especially important to "maintain data collection during a very critical period" when electrical and other systems may be failing.

Horne ticked off some of the items affecting installation and performance:

* The light range: Even within a single picture, it can vary by a factor of 100,000, between the brightest scenes above the clouds to a dimmed passenger cabin.

* The temperature can vary from -140[bar] F on the aircraft's exterior to more than 120[bar] F inside an aircraft parked in the desert.

* The power supply can vary and is subject to dropouts during engine start.

* The cabin pressure changes, and the rate of change can be rapid should decompression occur.

* High reliability and ease of maintainability must be considered.

Picture quality is a big issue. To record the instrument panel, a highresolution camera operating at a low frame rate (1/sec.) is preferred, but that capability requires a great deal of memory. For recording human and other activity, a lower resolution and 4-5 frames per second is preferable, as the imagery eats up less storage. "You almost need two separate cameras" to cover the cockpit, Horne said. His company is experimenting with a variety of possible cockpit camera installations to arrive at the best trade-off between resolution and frame rate.