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No, because flight recorders already save large amounts of information about what the plane is doing, the pilot inputs, and what is being said audibly. I'd like to understand how a visual that vastly increases the storage requirements would help understand an event.
Agree with your overall point, but in this Air India case a visual definitely would help to see which pilot (if any) flicked those switches to off. The audio is ambiguous.
Wouldn't the state of the switches be logged on the flight recorder?
Yes, but it might be very important to determine: did the pilot/copilot flick the switch, or did the switch change state without user input?
Is the crew at fault (training issue/operator error) or is the manufacturer at fault (design flaw) or was the ground crew at fault (improper maintenance)?
A camera could help determine that, if it had the right field of view.
Mechanical switches aren't flipping themselves 4 seconds apart by themselves
No, but a short circuit might
it is, mentour pilot released a video about the preliminary report the other day where it's mentioned that the fuel pumps were set back to active with a 4 second delay between flipping each switch.
this link should be set to the time stamp where he goes over what happened with the switches: https://youtu.be/lVS76zcpZok?t=1102
A couple terabytes of SSDs is a trivial expense on a commercial aircraft in 2025.
I hear a similar argument daily -- that the consumer no-RAID stuff is so cheap and thus storage should be cheap. The stuff you get on the shelf isn't valuable here as it wouldn't survive a crash. The consumer stuff would die quickly just from the brutal power-blips the system undergoes just as part of regular flight operations and power-source switching.
It could cost a hundred times as much and we're still only in the fifth digit of the airplane's nine-digit price tag.
You wouldn’t want this video stored on traditional SSDs though. You want it stored on media in a black box like the voice & data recorders so that it can survive crashes, fires, etc. Not sure what the costs associated with that would be though…
I'll leave the implementation details to the experts, but I'm sure there is a suitable option for storing 24 hours of video that adds only a negligible amount to the cost of a quarter-billion dollar airplane like the 787.
Again, negligible
Frame rate doesn’t necessarily have to be high. Idk how the black boxes on airplanes work, but surely storage options have increased a lot since their invention, right?
They're basically several terabytes of memory cards with a really really really good casing, locator beacon and a big battery.
Storage has improved hugely, but they also went from storing a hundred parameters once per second to storing a few hundred thousand parameters in pretty much realtime. Dozens of terabytes of data is already going in there.
On the other hand, we can basically realtime encode video nowadays, so I don't see why another 100gb would be a problem.
The concern here is storage requirements?
Having no visual is a huge disadvantage. You miss a great deal of context.
I think you're probably vastly overestimating how much increasing the storage on a flight recorder would cost.
Even magnetic storage has vastly dropped in price over the years, it's just become less common.