The Mystery of the missing Malaysia Airlines 777 would be solved if Boeing had cameras on board. In today’s day and age cameras are everywhere. We have powerful cameras on our smart phones that can transmit megapixel images to social networks around the globe instantly. Yet we seem to lack good quality camera equipment in places that would benefit the most. Places like: public transportation, public events, border crossings, capital buildings, parks, and airplanes. So a bigger mystery is why an airplane that costs a whopping $200 Million dollars does not have cameras that could help identify internal and external conditions that would prevent the type of missing plane situation we have now? On passenger airplanes cameras would be highly useful to image internal events like: a hijacking in process, trouble in the cockpit, issues in the cargo hold or irregular passenger behavior.
Some of the airbus A380 fleet employs external cameras on the tail. If the Malaysian flight was recovered with a rugged camera on the tail that recorded video we could more precisely identify any mid-air structural damages and also have an indication of flight path. Cameras can be equipped with wi-fi to transmit images to ground control instantly. Both visible and infrared cameras can also use video recorders to provide a visual history that could give even more information than the audio recorders we’ve relied on for years. Note to Boeing and Airbus – for less than $15,000 this $200m aircraft could employ cameras to prevent missing plane situations in the future.
Imagine internal and external cameras were used on the Malaysian Air flight. We would know exactly what happened inside and outside the plane and we would have found the aircraft by now.
Our thoughts are with the families of the passengers and crew aboard Malaysian Flight MH370.
Rice Camera Technologies
www.ricecamera.com
