Originally Posted by
SLFstu
Non-pilot here.
Noted in the report in section 1.8.4 about flight recorders is that the investigators were able to go back to a previous flight (on January 12) by the accident AC, with a different crew, that also took a circling approach from the north into RW12. That was 4 days and 23 sectors previously! A cumulative flight time according to FR24 of 695 minutes, averaging 30 minutes per sector.
That's 11 & 1/2 hours of data. Totally possible since the installed FDR had a 25-hour recording time. In an aircraft built in 2007.
Compare that to the hand-wringing on here about the recent runway incursions and near-CFIT incident aircraft having their 2-hour FDRs overwritten by the time the respective flights arrived at destination.
I think you're confusing CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) and FDR (Flight Data Recorder). The latter stores a lot more data than the CVR and probably has similar specs for every airplane mentionned in your post. Looking up the ATR's CVR's reference, it does only record for 2 hours.
Flight data from the planes involved in the recent runway incursions and near-CFIT incidents, may have already been extracted through QAR for FDA/FDM purposes.