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Cockpit Accessories Industry News Safety

Smile, This Flight is Being Recorded

Its easy to pick out a couple of pilots talking: Look for the folks bending their hands through the air trying to recreate a visual for that death-defying turn to final immediately followed by three consecutive touchdowns from one landing attempt. Technology can now put more fact into these fish stories or offer a better way to debrief exactly what happened right before the CFI hollered, "My airplane!" These three solutions hit different, but overlapping, missions. None are cheap, but all do the job they set out for. The NFlightCam is small and to-the-point, so we will be too: The thing works great. The camera is actually a ContourHD 1080 wearable camcorder thats less than four inches long and weighs about five ounces. NFlightCam replaces the standard mic with a circuit and cable to record cabin audio from the intercom. Thats plugged into any headset jack and can be connected inline so you can use a headset in the same outlet.

Jeff VanWest
Verified

Its easy to pick out a couple of pilots talking: Look for the folks bending their hands through the air trying to recreate a visual for that death-defying turn to final immediately followed by three consecutive touchdowns from one landing attempt.

Technology can now put more fact into these fish stories or offer a better way to

debrief exactly what happened right before the CFI hollered, “My airplane!” These three solutions hit different, but overlapping, missions. None are cheap, but all do the job they set out for.

NFlightCam

The NFlightCam is small and to-the-point, so we will be too: The thing works great.

The camera is actually a ContourHD 1080 wearable camcorder thats less than four inches long and weighs about five ounces. NFlightCam replaces the standard mic with a circuit and cable to record cabin audio from the intercom. Thats plugged into any headset jack and can be connected inline so you can use a headset in the same outlet.

The lens has a 110-degree field of view, so you can mount it high behind the front seats to get both cockpit and runway ahead. However, the cabin may be somewhat dark due to the brighter view outside. You can mount it at any angle because the lens rotates, complete with a button to project two lasers for getting a level-image reference. After that, slide a beefy switch forward to record and aft to stop.

The back face of the camera slides off to connect move files to the computer via USB and recharge the battery, which the company claims will last two hours. We ran out of recording space after 30 minutes on the 2GB microSD card we had. The camera will take up to a 16GB card. The package includes software to configure the camera for resolution and sound level, as we’ll as download the movies. That software is refreshingly simple and available for both Mac and Windows.

The NFlightCam is $399 from the company or from outlets like Sportys (who lent us one). A new version with an internal GPS is $499. We havent tried that one,

Jeff VanWest