Cockpit Voice Recorders and Flight Data Recorders
 

Under the New Zealand ATPL helicopter syllabus:

Describe how data from the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder can be accessed.

Can someone help me with the answer to this? My understanding was it was only for the appropriate authorities. ie NTSB, CAA.

As a lame I can access both using a computer program and cable connected to the fdr or cvr. I can then analyse all the data or listen to the 2 hours of cvr audio on each channel.

Would depend on the individual aircraft and CVR/FDR type I would think.

As Diabloblizzard stated, it's not generally a difficult job for an avionic engineer to either view and listen to or download all of the CVR and FDR data.

On our maintenance schedule, there is a 12 month CVFDR inspection which involves checking that the FDR parameters have all been recording satisfactorily and that all of the CVR channels have good clear audio quality.

One point worth mentioning is that some companies have fairly strict policies in place limiting who is allowed to access the data and what they can do with that data and with the company that I work for, there is a requirement to obtain the written permission of any flight crew who are recorded on the CVR prior to listening to it. (This is only for maintenance purposes. No such permission is required if the access is because of an accident or incident).

For aircraft being monitored in a Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) programme, the FDR data is also typically accessed by Quick Access Recorder card (QAR) for download into the FDM system.

Thanks for your help everyone. Seems the syllabus item is a bit broad and it really depends on the operation itself.