The FAA announced today that they are revis­ing the require­ments for Flight Data Recorders. The new rules involve major increases in sam­pling rate (from 1 Hz to 16 Hz) and time capac­ity (from 30 min­utes to 25 hours). They are also finally requir­ing a backup bat­tery. These are pretty use­ful improve­ments. Con­sid­er­ing how many peo­ple today carry com­pa­ra­ble func­tion­al­ity in the form of an iPod, you could argue that they are long overdue.

To my delight, the FAA offi­cially rejected the NTSB’s demand for cock­pit video recorders. Of course they would be expen­sive, and pilots hate the idea of being on cam­era. I wish the FAA had gone so far as to claim that video recorders would be use­less, because they are.

The NTSB claims that cock­pit video would have made a huge dif­fer­ence in sev­eral inves­ti­ga­tions, like the EgyptAir 990 crash in 1999. In that event, the cap­tain leaves the cock­pit for the restroom. The relief first-officer starts repeat­edly chant­ing “I rely on God,” pushes the 767 into a 0.2 G dive (wow!) and cuts the engines. The cap­tain soon returns and tries unsuc­cess­fully to fight the first officer’s con­trol inputs. The plane crashes off Nan­tucket. Now what addi­tional facts would you have learned from a video ver­sion of the same story? The color of their uni­forms? Silly people.

I recently learned that mod­ern cars clev­erly mea­sure the posi­tions of the seats and the weight of the front pas­sen­ger to deter­mine the appro­pri­ate level of airbag deploy­ment in a crash. (They also alter the deploy­ment tim­ing based on whether the seat belt is fas­tened.) Flight Data Recorders could employ sim­i­lar tech­niques to non-intrusively record what’s going on with the pilots.