Here is a very good observation placed on P&O Ferries facebook page in response to our petition to P&O Ferries to Install CCTV cameras on Passenger Decks: Grant Randall: I am a certifying aircraft maintenance engineer. If a similar case were to exist in Aviation, it would have been mandated already, at least for all new aircraft and refits (Indeed, on some aircraft, there are external cameras for passenger entertainment alone and, since 9/11, internal cctv for the flight crew to watch the cabin!). Such is the safety awareness in the aircraft industry! Obviously the maritime equivalents have some catching up to do! The technology is inexpensive and already exists... In my own experience of using a £100 IP camera I have, by Foscam, that this is potentially easy to implement: This camera can be set up to monitor alarm zones and times. It is capable of sounding an alarm when a particular part of the image sees a movement and records stills or video clips from -10 seconds for 20 seconds. These are recorded wirelessly to a remote digital medium for later review. It can thus catch burglars red handed! (in the dark too, using infra-red) Using this technology, it would be easy to identify at-risk "over the side" zones where passengers may fall or jump unobserved and equip them with zone alarmed cameras with time and GPS flag stamped on the image. I don't believe that every bit of deck space needs to be watched! On receiving an alarm, the appointed crew can review the image and decide whether it is a seagull, or other spurious movement and ignore or command a stop and search routine. The viewing could also be available publicly on the cabin channels as general sight seeing platform when they don't want to be on deck! This could help sell interior cabin space! (like a large screen electronic porthole!) obviously the cameras need to be robust and motion sensitivity needs to be more sophisticated to filter flashes of light, water waves, reflections, even birds? etc but the principle already exists. even wiring is easy with wireless data available. As for "storage capacity [for the footage]."? Have these people not heard of the digital age? Whats a few terabytes between friends? I have enough capacity on my laptop for the whole of P&O and Cunard fleets put together for a month of data! And if the cost of such a system were say even £1 million in development and £1 million to fit per ship. (I can't believe it would even come close) So what when the cost of each ship is in excess of £400 million. The system could also help with ship / dockside accidents! (maybe thats what they are afraid of!) This should be mandated for all new large passenger vessels at least! Given the above, why this isn't mandated on all large passenger ships? An official government backed study is needed!