JAL has a cool nose gear camera - shows looking forward with gear down and during cruise you can look straight down. Neat when there is no cloud cover over the Pacific.

A related question. If Columbia had external cameras would that have saved the ship and crew?

As most people here would know the leading edge of the left wing was damaged during the launch. So had the crew seen the damage they could have done something about it. What exactly I don't know.

I have enjoyed the nose gear camera on Emirates, Thai, Singapore, and All Nippon... Pretty cool. On some flights it was available as a tv channel, on others all screens automatically showed it until we were a couple of thousand feet up.

Money, weight, and drag. Everything you put on an airplane costs money to purchase, even more money to certify, and any external items add drag. Covering an entire large jet would take a lot of cameras. So what's the motivation?

Emirates had nose, tail and downward facing cameras on the last flight I was on (an A380).

I'm with Joe. Several of the Corporate types I flew (G4, Challenger 604) had cameras around the plane. One of the G4's had one in front of the mair landing gear bay looking aft. While watching the gear cycle was usually not possible for us (busy time), it did provide a look at the bay prior to pressurizing the hydraulics while on the ground. The thing it DID give a good check of was the freshness of the coffee prior to it getting to us. The flight attendants never were able to figure out how we knew the coffee was fresh or zapped. We knew it was fresh when we saw the old stuff go down the galley drain and exit the plane just aft of the gear.

Fresh coffee is as important as 5606 for the operation of aircraft. Maybe more so.

Because there's nothing living inside a flight data recorder, except for the mouse that is. :)

A data recording device is quite different from internal/external body parts.

Sherwood