FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1997
1997 - 0037.PDF
There may be more than a safety aspect to the use of external video-cameras on aircraft. Caught on camera DAVID LEARMOUNT/LONDON THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE" British Airtours disaster at Manchester in August 1985 led the UK Civil Aviation Authority to investigate the installation of external aircraft-surveillance video cameras. About a decade later, a review of CAA tests was published, revealing that the Authority does not consider cameras a necessary safety tool, and that at present it has no plans to require their installation. Meanwhile, one of the specialist companies which took part in the tests believes that the future of external video cameras on aircraft lies, not in safety applications, but in the area of in flight entertainment. This is not what the world had been expecting to hear. In the Manchester accident, although the aircraft never left the ground and did not collide with anything, 55 people died, mostly from asphyxiation from noxious fumes. The fire had started when the Boeing 737-200's number one engine exploded. A combustion chamber had failed, and a piece of shrapnel from the explosion pierced a wing-fuel tank. The crew, unaware of the severity of the fire because they could not see the engine or wing, abandoned take-off but did not halt on the runway and order immediate evacuation. The captain decided to leave the runway before stop ping, putting the burning wing upwind of the fuselage. The fire spread fast to the fuselage, and the rest is history. One of the first questions to emerge from the incident was: if the crew had been able to see easily how severe the fire was, would they have arranged emergency evacuation of the aircraft faster? The answer is almost certainly "yes". In January 1989, in another UK accident, a fan blade on a 737-400's engine failed. There was a burst of flame from the engine, seen by many of the passengers. The powerplant, how ever, did not catch fire and, because the crew immediately throttled both engines back to idle to descend quickly to East Midlands Airport, many of the symptoms of the fan-blade failure disappeared. The result was that the crew shut down the undamaged engine, while the dam aged one failed on final approach, and the air craft crashed short of the airport. If there had been a screen on the flightdeck displaying the view of the aircraft from a "fish- eye" video camera on the tail fin, would the pilots have seen the flame which the passengers saw? If they had, 47 lives might have been saved. THE TESTS The CAA installed three external video cameras on a British Airways Boeing 747-100. A camera on the tail fin viewed the starboard wing; one on the port tailplane viewed the port-wing trailing edge; and a camera with a panning capability was mounted on the forward underbelly. This could scan an arc with the inboard engine intakes at either extremity, and it covered all the main landing gear. The BA test was set up for engineering pur poses. There was no display in the flightdeck, but the camera displays could be viewed at a point in the upper cabin, and a video-recording system was installed there. Even though the Vinten surveillance equip ment had not been made with an aviation appli cation in mind, the CAA says: "In general, the cameras operated satisfactorily in all the mete orological and atmospheric conditions experi enced." Observers made the following points: • "...the system produced no usable pictures after dusk. Even on a brightly lit apron, it was not possible to discern details of the airframe"; • "...no particular benefits of colour pictures over monochrome were discerned, especially at altitude". In fact, monochrome produced better clarity, which outweighed any advantage of a colour picture; • the underbelly camera was prone to misting, and to the effects of rain and spray; • the iris control could not cope with the large brightness variations which occur in flight; • recorded pictures were of inferior quality ^- FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 1 - 7 January 1997 35
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
