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Respectfully: the pilots have been doing an absolutely excellent job with it for decades without us having to destroy their privacy. An argument can easily be

Respectfully: the pilots have been doing an absolutely excellent job with it for decades without us having to destroy their privacy. An argument can easily be made that this extra stress will make flying less safe. Edit: my next car will probably have mandatory spyware and unlike pilots there won't be a guaranteed no blame process if something happens. It is pretty easy to see how this will be abused by insurance companies and data harvesters. I think I kind of understand the processes that lead to this. But I seriously wish tech people wouldn't be accepting it and even argue for it.

wholelotta 3y ago
Respectfully, history is a terrible measure for carrying on as we have. Tech people are arguing for accountability in a life/death scenario. That there is no privacy in public spaces is a longstanding social/legal tradition. A cockpit is physically private for physical security reasons but the pilots in the cockpit are acting on behalf of public trust. Their social norms in that physical context are not their own to define. If pilots want privacy they can quit and sit at home.
- t0mas88 3y ago
  Free market at play, no airline can afford to say "well then quit and sit at home". There is a huge pilot shortage. No airline in their right mind is about to do things their workforce doesn't want. Just to illustrate, 5 years ago a first officer on year 2 pay would make on average 40-50k per year. In 2023 that has increased to 143k per year for all three American Airlines owned regionals (plus a 165k retention bonus). Similar for Spirit, increased to 142k standard and 145k on the Airbus. And JetBlue to 160k for the A320 and 153k for the A220. In this market, the first airline CEO to say "well then quit and sit at home" to their union will have half their workforce walk out within months.
  - xeornet 3y ago
    Precisely why the FAA should implement this and not leave it up to the airlines.
    - eitland 3y ago
      So far I can't see anyone coming up with any cases were this would have made life safer or even solved a previously unsolved case. The law of diminishing returns very much exist, and as one of my teachers in engineering once pointed out: if you really want to use surveillance to put a dent in the crime statistics you should put it in people's living rooms and in their bedrooms.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Do you feel the same way about surveillance of the inside of your car while it's on public roadways?
  - xeornet 3y ago
    If I’m a taxi driver or school bus driver, yes!
    - thfuran 3y ago
      You're just a able to crash into oncoming traffic as any cabbie. Why should you not be subject to the same intrusive surveillance? What are you hiding?
      - xeornet 3y ago
        There's a key distinction between operating a vehicle for commercial purposes and a private operation, not just the ability to harm others. There's a reason why commercial pilots licences are in a completely different league in terms of training and responsibility to PPLs.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lotsofpulp 3y ago
> Edit: my next car will probably have mandatory spyware and unlike pilots there won't be a guaranteed no blame process if something happens. It is pretty easy to see how this will be abused by insurance companies and data harvesters. If anything, the proliferation of dash cams will (and have) lead to bad drivers being appropriately charged more for insurance than good drivers. Previously, if you were cut off and collided with someone, you were always assumed to be at fault if you were behind the other driver.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  You can't imagine bad things that mass surveillance will lead to?
zarzavat 3y ago
People have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their workplace. But expecting safety measures that could potentially prevent hundreds of deaths to be limited to preserve employee privacy is not reasonable.
- KolmogorovComp 3y ago
  Couldn’t you say about population mass surveillance too?
- eitland 3y ago
  As I argue above pilots already have an excellent safety record. Have you considered what the extra stress of considering ones every word during a long and stressful day can do to someones concentration? I mean many, the thoughts about what they said earlier this morning is bad enough even if it wasn't recorded. We already record a couple of hours or so. If you want to record more, it is up to you to come up with data for how many more air traffic accidents we can solve and also to explain how we can know that it won't make air traffic more dangerous.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    > how we can know that it won't make air traffic more dangerous. This is an argument against any change that involves unknowns. I see it often, and I absolutely hate it.
    - tga_d 3y ago
      Air travel is an industry with high risk yet a good safety track record. It seems like exactly the sort of place you wouldn't want to experiment. You can argue that this incident is a blemish in that track record, but it's not obvious to me how "add every word uttered by flight crews to a permanent record" would meaningfully address this incident (at least, any more than doing the same for every other job in the supply chain, from factory workers all the way up to the executives at Boeing), and it is obvious to me how it could be harmful.

wholelotta 3y ago

Respectfully, history is a terrible measure for carrying on as we have. Tech people are arguing for accountability in a life/death scenario. That there is no privacy in public spaces is a longstanding social/legal tradition. A cockpit is physically private for physical security reasons but the pilots in the cockpit are acting on behalf of public trust. Their social norms in that physical context are not their own to define. If pilots want privacy they can quit and sit at home.

t0mas88 3y ago
Free market at play, no airline can afford to say "well then quit and sit at home". There is a huge pilot shortage. No airline in their right mind is about to do things their workforce doesn't want. Just to illustrate, 5 years ago a first officer on year 2 pay would make on average 40-50k per year. In 2023 that has increased to 143k per year for all three American Airlines owned regionals (plus a 165k retention bonus). Similar for Spirit, increased to 142k standard and 145k on the Airbus. And JetBlue to 160k for the A320 and 153k for the A220. In this market, the first airline CEO to say "well then quit and sit at home" to their union will have half their workforce walk out within months.
- xeornet 3y ago
  Precisely why the FAA should implement this and not leave it up to the airlines.
  - eitland 3y ago
    So far I can't see anyone coming up with any cases were this would have made life safer or even solved a previously unsolved case. The law of diminishing returns very much exist, and as one of my teachers in engineering once pointed out: if you really want to use surveillance to put a dent in the crime statistics you should put it in people's living rooms and in their bedrooms.
thfuran 3y ago
Do you feel the same way about surveillance of the inside of your car while it's on public roadways?
- xeornet 3y ago
  If I’m a taxi driver or school bus driver, yes!
  - thfuran 3y ago
    You're just a able to crash into oncoming traffic as any cabbie. Why should you not be subject to the same intrusive surveillance? What are you hiding?
    - xeornet 3y ago
      There's a key distinction between operating a vehicle for commercial purposes and a private operation, not just the ability to harm others. There's a reason why commercial pilots licences are in a completely different league in terms of training and responsibility to PPLs.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lotsofpulp 3y ago

> Edit: my next car will probably have mandatory spyware and unlike pilots there won't be a guaranteed no blame process if something happens. It is pretty easy to see how this will be abused by insurance companies and data harvesters. If anything, the proliferation of dash cams will (and have) lead to bad drivers being appropriately charged more for insurance than good drivers. Previously, if you were cut off and collided with someone, you were always assumed to be at fault if you were behind the other driver.

wolverine876 3y ago
You can't imagine bad things that mass surveillance will lead to?

zarzavat 3y ago

People have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their workplace. But expecting safety measures that could potentially prevent hundreds of deaths to be limited to preserve employee privacy is not reasonable.

KolmogorovComp 3y ago
Couldn’t you say about population mass surveillance too?
eitland 3y ago
As I argue above pilots already have an excellent safety record. Have you considered what the extra stress of considering ones every word during a long and stressful day can do to someones concentration? I mean many, the thoughts about what they said earlier this morning is bad enough even if it wasn't recorded. We already record a couple of hours or so. If you want to record more, it is up to you to come up with data for how many more air traffic accidents we can solve and also to explain how we can know that it won't make air traffic more dangerous.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  > how we can know that it won't make air traffic more dangerous. This is an argument against any change that involves unknowns. I see it often, and I absolutely hate it.
  - tga_d 3y ago
    Air travel is an industry with high risk yet a good safety track record. It seems like exactly the sort of place you wouldn't want to experiment. You can argue that this incident is a blemish in that track record, but it's not obvious to me how "add every word uttered by flight crews to a permanent record" would meaningfully address this incident (at least, any more than doing the same for every other job in the supply chain, from factory workers all the way up to the executives at Boeing), and it is obvious to me how it could be harmful.