Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
This paper is intended to provide a summary of the present role of the flight recorder in relation to the investigation of aircraft accidents and to refer briefly to its future role in this field, together with its potential for flight safety monitoring.
The paper deals principally with the philosophy of data recording for these purposes and with the general needs of the associated data recording, recovery and analysis systems. It also describes the predominant problems encountered up to the present time in the use of such systems for accident investigation purposes in the United Kingdom. The technical problems relating to system design, information recovery and analysis are, however, of a specialised nature and can only be referred to in brief terms within the scope of this paper.