Aircraft accident prevention, or at least minimizing question?

Question

Watching TV shows like "seconds from disaster", I'm amazed at how may accidents are made much worse because the pilots can't see the engines or the tail.

TV cameras are now very small. Why are there not a dozen camera scattered around to get views of the engines and the tail? Or perhaps this is in process? I hope!

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Answer 1

Dennis is correct. To add to his remark, there is little benefit to external monitors in an emergency situation. If the engine is on fire, or you lose a section of the tail, or whatever... the video can be fairly poor for relaying information. Now they are beginning to install an infered camera for seeing the run way in a clouded or fogged sky. The older aircraft as Dennis illudes to, was very crowded with "steam guages", but now we have the ability to change between video sources easily more cameras will begin popping up on the aircraft. We we ill see how usefull they are in years to come.  

Answer 2

That's actually being done on some aircraft now. Unfortunately, the pilots can't see the video, but it's recorded on the 'black box'.

Answer 3

To add to what's above, if  you consider the accident you mentioned, it wasn't lack of cameras that caused them to shut down the wrong engine. Each engine has several heat detectors and the fire control panel has separate indicators for the #1 and #2 engines, and APU. A big flashing red light tells them which engine in on fire, and they are on opposite sides of the control, so they are not easy to mistake. Unfortunately the crew must have panicked and shut down the opposite engine (such things have happened too many times before).

Answer 4

Planes do have small cameras now. Gulfstream 450 and 550's have 7 external cameras counting the flir (forward looking infrared) on the nose. many new airliners are being build with cameras now too

The reason most older planes don't have cameras is not because the camera was too big, but because there was no good way to get the information to the pilots. cockpits use every last bit of available space, adding a dedicated monitor was just out of the question.  Now there is the technology to use an mfd (multi function display) to display external cameras, then flip the screen to other information, like changing windows on your computer.