how hard is it to provide some 5Mbps internet connection on an airplane? (I'm actually asking this)
Quite.
Without any easy method to transmit an internet signal it is going to be a pain.
Some planes offer internet but it is slow as hell.
And you cant use satellites either.
VGA or SVGA at 30fps needs to be at least 2mbps for good quality to see what is happening and for any overhead for signal loss.
Now how many cameras on each plane?
How many planes will have these cameras.
On average there are 5000 planes in the air above the US.
Lets use math to work out what will be happening.
5000 planes X 2mbps =10gbps of bandwidth and that is just for one camera
10gbps X number of cameras = 20, 30gbps.
That is alot of throughput and where will all this data be stored?
Who will have access to it?
How secure will it really be?
Lets say Air Famine or Grayfox Airlines are actual companies
Do they want another country having audio-video of their pilots when the company is not from said country where the data is being stored?
I cant answer for any real company but i do not think so.
Plus when auto pilot is on the pilots private conversions will be viewable/heard on the stream which is an invasion of privacy as only the pilots in the cockpit to hear it(apart from the CVR(which doesn't matter unless something happened)).
If the pilots are just talking amongst themselves about the company pushing their workers too hard and making them work too many hours and the company was listening in they can get sacked.
Now in the event of total power loss, planes have the ability to generate power via a rat turbine which is used to power cockpit flight controls, this means internet and the CCTV will not be recording.
And IIRC the Airbus A380 has a camera mounted on the tail which feeds to the passenger cabin LCD screens so passengers can view the plane taking off.
