My knee-jerk reaction is "they should be recorded" so I write this to attempt to steel-man the alternative.
A core concept of safety is arriving at a root cause in an effort to continuously improve. This won't happen in an adversarial fact finding as the interests of the participants diverge instead of converge. Two key concepts here are Psychological Safety and Just Culture.
What could be adversarial about just recording the interview? While NTSB's argument for recording interviews is facially sound, it represents a change from previous practice. Further, it represents opening a collaborative and open fact-finding conversation to third parties who have adversarial interests. Key concepts here are "Don't talk to cops" [2] and Nothing to Hide [3]
It is ironic that the NTSB's interest in recording is in part driven by a lack of data caused by no-one at the airport pulling the Andon cord [4] at the time of the near miss. The cockpit voice recorders only record two hours. Since the flight continued to take off and flew for more than 2 hours, the voice data was lost. The NTSB seeks to record for "highest degree of accuracy, completeness, and efficiency" the pilots many days after the event based on their memory as a witness of themselves [4].
A core concept of safety is arriving at a root cause in an effort to continuously improve. This won't happen in an adversarial fact finding as the interests of the participants diverge instead of converge. Two key concepts here are Psychological Safety and Just Culture.
What could be adversarial about just recording the interview? While NTSB's argument for recording interviews is facially sound, it represents a change from previous practice. Further, it represents opening a collaborative and open fact-finding conversation to third parties who have adversarial interests. Key concepts here are "Don't talk to cops" [2] and Nothing to Hide [3]
It is ironic that the NTSB's interest in recording is in part driven by a lack of data caused by no-one at the airport pulling the Andon cord [4] at the time of the near miss. The cockpit voice recorders only record two hours. Since the flight continued to take off and flew for more than 2 hours, the voice data was lost. The NTSB seeks to record for "highest degree of accuracy, completeness, and efficiency" the pilots many days after the event based on their memory as a witness of themselves [4].
0. https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/wh...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_culture
2. https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/advice-from-cops-dont-talk...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183265/