Image: © Bernal Sabori, CC-BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This article is the tenth in a series on landmark events in aviation since Flight Safety Foundation was founded in 1945.
As with many aviation practices, flight data collection began with the Wright Brothers, who were known for their detailed record-keeping. They noted their early successes and failures, their research, and details of their flights. Other early pilots followed suit, keeping personal diaries that also served as aircraft logs.
Their efforts were the earliest precursors of the increasingly detailed data collection systems developed over the years and of today’s shared data analysis systems — with information gathered not only from flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders but also from a succession of data-sharing …
