It does make me wonder: why are aircraft takeoffs and landings not recorded more often, with higher quality cameras and more angles? If I can watch an NFL replay in 4k a few seconds after the ball is snapped, why not record (and overwrite) all flights that take off and land at every airport?

Like a dash cam, they can save the footage only if there is a problem. Surely that would be much better than splicing together many third party camera recordings.

Most frequently the actions/evidence that lead to a crash would not be captured on airport-located cameras. The holes in the swiss cheese usually start lining up either in the maintenance hangar, en route, or in the briefing room, not on the runway.

The NTSB (and many of their non-US counterparts) are incredibly adept at accident investigation using debris, black boxes and CVRs. Even in cases where the black boxes are damaged and video evidence is available, the video evidence is usually not so helpful as to be able to determine a root cause.

If you take into account that the cameras would be mostly useless in low-light or poor visibility conditions, and the costs associated with maintaining a nationwide network of high-res cameras that cover all runways at all major commercial airports (and ensures their lines of sight and operation through the never-ending renovations going on at these airports), I'm not sure that the benefits of having the cameras make sense.

> If I can watch an NFL replay in 4k a few seconds after the ball is snapped, why not record (and overwrite) all flights that take off and land at every airport?

An NFL game has a ton of cameras, a ton of camera operators, those fancy cameras on wire things, an onsite editing crew, and an audience.

To get good recordings, you'd need to invest a lot of time and money, and very few of the recordings would ever be watched. Doesn't seem worth the investment given third party recording seem to turn up quite often and video isn't terribly necessary for the investigation.

Because aviation is already incredibly, ridiculously safe compared to essentially every other activity humanity undertakes, and adding additional cost, complexity and expense to the system would produce zero discernible benefit relative to the cost.

Airports might have the footage, but not release it. It's probably easier for a journalist to ask for the footage from a random strip mall parking lot.

Have you seen dash cam footage?

High quality cameras are actually really rare and expensive.