From The Washington Post . . .
"The plane, a Beechcraft 1900D, had logged eight flights since the maintenance Monday night at an Air Midwest facility in Huntington, W.Va. No pilots complained of any irregularities. However, when investigators looked at the flight data recorder, they saw that during those flights the plane's elevators appeared to be in a position that would have made it impossible to take off -- a sign that either a sensor gave a false reading to the data recorder or that the elevators had not been properly rigged, according to a source close to the investigation."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2003Jan9.html
Can a flight data recorder record anomalies a pilot might not detect? If so, perhaps future recorders could perform an analysis function, detecting and reporting anomalies to the pilot.