Cockpit video recording -- the time is now.

I'm sick and tired of reading about glider crashes and never knowing what actually happened. We badly need to be able to learn from the misfortune of our soaring compadres.

The obvious answer is that we all have a camera mounted over our right shoulder that will simultaneously monitor the scene out the front canopy, monitor the panel instruments and monitor the pilot's flight inputs. Such a camera would be effective even if operating at a low frame rate -- perhaps something like 5 frames/sec. With today's technology such a unit could be quite small and the cost would be reasonable. The camera automatically goes on when flight is detected and off when flight stops by any of several easy detection means. Flight video would be logged to a micro SD that is looped over after some number of hours: 10 hours, 24 hours, whatever.

The only technological challenge would be making such a recorder fireproof. The latest horrible crash did ignite an incinerating fire. But fires are a rarity in glider accidents. Step one could be a video logger that does not necessarily address fireproofing.

How can we make this happen? Clearly individuals will not be highly motivated to go out and buy one since they are unlikely to personally benefit from their own camera. It needs to be somehow mandated. I would hate to look to the government for a mandate as it would take too long among other issues.. How about a mandate from SSA? Contests? Clubs? OLC? or tow operators? Every glider needs to have a video logger running on every flight.

One other sociological factor would be that there not be discrimination allowed on the release of the data. The data needs to be available for anyone and everyone to analyze upon its retrieval. Pilots, attorneys, widows, government entities and insurance companies should not have say in that matter. We need to think up a good solution to that. Maybe the pilot doesn't actually own the logger and media. Maybe the SSA owns the logger and leases them on condition of data availability upon any reportable accident.

No more mysteries! We need to know what is causing our accidents so we have a chance to fix the problems.