by Matthew L. Wald, New York Times
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - The Sept. 11 hijackings have left pilots wanting more knowledge about activity in the passenger cabin, without stepping through their newly fortified doors. Now the Transportation Department, with encouragement from Congress, is considering requiring video cameras that will provide images of passengers to the cockpit.
Manufacturers, working to anticipate a demand, are developing systems, including one that would transmit images from hidden cameras to the cockpit and to tiny hand-held screens that air marshals could look at without blowing their cover.
United Airlines will begin a six-month test of cabin surveillance this summer, using a system built by Rockwell Collins, which has its headquarters here. The system feeds the images from as many as 32 cameras to hand-held computers in the cockpit, and beams them back into the cabin, where they can be picked up by a pocket computer.
Robert G. Geers, of Rockwell Collins, demonstrated the system on an HP Jornada, which captured the images from tiny cameras hidden in a model of a first-class cabin. It also captured pictures from a camera focused on people in a hotel conference room here, who jerked a bit like a Charlie Chaplin character, because the system does not run as fast as an ordinary television. But the image was clear.
Mr. Geers tapped the screen with a stylus to alternate among images.
“To the guy next to the marshal, it just looks like he’s playing a video game,” said Mr. Geers, a business development manager.
United plans a four-camera system on a Boeing 747 that pilots can use to assure themselves, before they emerge from the cockpit to use the lavatory, that no one is lurking behind the door in wait. Since Sept. 11, airlines have relied on secret knocks and passwords.
Jet Blue, a new airline based in New York that flies a new Airbus A320 fleet, recently put cameras on several of its 25 planes and expects to install them on all planes in a few months. Two cameras are visible, one outside the cockpit door and the other at the rear galley, and two others are hidden, said Fiona Morrison, a spokeswoman.
“It gives our pilots some eyes,” she said.
Security officials are intrigued. At a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee on May 21, the undersecretary of transportation for security, John Magaw, said no to giving pilots guns but expressed strong interest in giving them video surveillance of the cabin. If pilots knew a hijacking attempt was under way, they could throw their planes into radical maneuvers, Mr. Magaw said, to knock the hijackers over.
“Unless you are seat-belted in, they can make your equilibrium so that you can’t function,” he said.
Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, said: “It’s not expensive, it’s not a new-tech, a high-tech situation — it’s a rearview mirror. Please do it. Don’t wait.”
United likes the idea of surveillance, but not radical maneuvers. “I don’t mind the rearview mirror part,” said Capt. Joseph D. Burns, United’s director for flight operations technology, in a telephone interview. But, he said, airplanes are tested up to certain limits in maneuvering. “Exceed that, and you’re a test pilot,” he said. “Your chance of damaging the aircraft beyond repair exceeds your chance of disabling a hijacker.”
The Rockwell Collins camera system can be configured to record, and to play back the last few seconds, and can be set up to beam images to the ground.
Rockwell Collins’s main American rival in the commercial avionics business, Honeywell, has been offering camera systems to airlines since early this year, said Ben McLeod, the company’s director of aviation safety and security. Mr. McLeod said in a telephone interview that he thought flight crew unions would push the airlines into installing the systems even if the government never required them. “Ultimately, that’s where the motivation will come from,” he said.
The systems could sell for a second reason, he said. “The occurrence of hijackings is going to be so rare,” he said, but “air rage” is far more frequent. Before Sept. 11, air rage was a major concern for airlines.
“What we’ve seen historically is the only cases successfully prosecuted were those where they had had some hard evidence,” Mr. McLeod said. A tape would provide that, he added.
Mr. McLeod said Honeywell’s system would have at least three cameras , mostly to assure people on the flight deck that it was safe to come out to use the restroom. But there could be 10 on a large plane, he said. Mr. Geers of Rockwell foresaw cameras in cargo holds, to look for stowaways or other problems, and cameras under the belly, so pilots at the gate could tell whether the cargo doors had been latched.
The Honeywell system’s cameras could be black and white or color, but the system will also use infrared, Mr. McLeod said. That makes it possible for the system to see in the dark.
At Jet Blue, executives decided that recording the images would violate passengers’ privacy. But a placard on the cockpit door tells passengers that they may be under video surveillance. That alone may reduce air rage, Ms. Morrison said.