Lots of discussion on the thread about the CVR and the FDR. Naturally we all wish to learn what was recorded.
Yet should not the EICAS and the AIMS have their own memories? My flight manual does not go into that level of detail, but I would imagine that at the very minimum status messages and above are logged--we know that maintenance always looks at AIMS after every flight. Even the most cursory look-through reveals a ton of monitored items.
I am not sure how many parameters are recorded by the FDR although I had once read it is in the hundreds now. Just thinking that AIMS might have something that the FDR does not.
Any Boeing engineers on the thread who can give us a bit more granularity on this?
It might very well be that these systems could be more revealing that the CVR and possibly the FDR.
Hamster, I saw your post after I posted mine. Do you know the size of the parameter list?
After the expansion of the list of required parameter groups in 2002, Boeing started installing FDRs capable of 3 Kbps.