Patent ID: 7426387

Claim:
A system for providing a retrievable record of the flight performance of an aircraft comprising: an airborne data acquisition unit coupled to the aircraft flight data recorder that continuously obtains flight performance data representative of aircraft flight performance during an entire flight of the aircraft from at least take-off to landing, a wireless radio frequency (RF) carrier-based subsystem coupled to the airborne data acquisition unit including: a processing unit that receives and processes the flight performance data collected by the airborne data acquisition unit, an archival data store coupled to the processing unit operative to continuously accumulate and continuously store the processed flight performance data during a flight of the aircraft from at least take-off to landing, and a wireless RF transceiver coupled to said archival data store, and comprising a transmitter that is operative after the aircraft completes its flight and lands at an airport to automatically download the flight performance data that has been accumulated and stored by said archival data store during an entire flight of the aircraft from at least take-off to landing over a wireless RF communication signal; a ground based receiver that receives the wireless RF communication signal from the aircraft and demodulates the signal to obtain the flight performance data; and a ground based data store coupled to said ground based receiver that receives and stores said flight performance data.