Plane crash mysteries spur renewed calls for cockpit cameras

“We’re too low! We’re too low! We’re too low!” The Boeing 737 co-pilot’s frenzied warnings on Sept. 28, 2018 came too late. Within seconds, the Air Niugini Ltd. passenger flight slammed into the waters of the western Pacific, half a kilometer short of the runway at Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia. One of the 47 people on board, unbelted and flung forward on impact, was killed before the plane sank. But investigators got lucky. Sitting at the back of the cockpit, a maintenance engineer was recording the flight’s final minutes on his iPhone, just for fun. The footage laid bare the sequence of events almost immediately. It showed the pilot headed toward a storm cell that lit up his navigation screen. He descended blindly through rain and cloud, windscreen wipers flailing, and ignored the order on his flight display to pull up. Six other passengers were seriously injured upon impact, though there were no additional fatalities. Several disasters later -- including two Boeing 737 Max tragedies and the fatal plunge into a hillside in March by a China Eastern jet -- there are renewed calls for aircraft to be fitted with cockpit image or video recorders. The push is reigniting a standoff between pilots who guard their privacy, and crash specialists and bodies such as the US NTSB that are under pressure to solve mystery accidents and prevent them from happening again. Among those advocating for image recorders is air-safety pioneer Mike Poole, who worked for the Transportation Safety Board of Canada for more than 20 years and led its flight-recorder laboratory. Story has more.<br/>