Originally Posted by bearfoil
Ultimately, everything should be on the table, "tidying up" should be open to critique, yes?
I have the impression you've never seen or had to work with raw flight test data or FDR data....
They are just long meaningless tables of initially meaningless numbers.
(Read the earlier posts (a few pages back) about coding and scaling and calibration and time-stamps.)
"Tidying up" is a misleading term.
All those numbers are first "decoded" and "translated" into "real" values, such as speed, altitude, control surface position, etc., then plotted. and checked and correlated for verisimilitude.
The "tidying up" then consists in extracting the "story", and finally in producing a legible report, usually with info-graphics that are understandable by the public, and non-specialists.