> Catastrophic crash scenarios are not the only scenarios where data preservation is desirable. That's exactly why I said "In a malfunction scenario" in my com

> Catastrophic crash scenarios are not the only scenarios where data preservation is desirable. That's exactly why I said "In a malfunction scenario" in my comment. Modern aviation uses essentially a blameless post-mortem incident reporting process where pilots are encouraged to report when something unexpected happens - even though the airplane wasn't damaged and no one was injured. This has helped tremendously both in discovering issues that could be the cause of a crash in the future as well as improving training for other pilots. But very rarely is any data recovered in these situations. If things worked as I noted maintenance would have enough time to grab the data after the report without storing the recordings forever.