Everything related to the hijacking should have been saved, just as a matter of routine, for some period of time.
The FAA, not the FBI, would be the primary agency to preserve the evidence related to an aircraft accident/incident.
thats right ... unless the NWA History people would have a copy? But Bruce Kitt says no. I asked a long time ago. Bruce's comment to me was: "I would love to have those documents!" Bruce has a personal interest in this.
Georger, whoever prepared that new map you recently posted stated in the accompanying write-up that they used data from the FDR. If it was NWA that prepared the map and write-up, and I think it was, then they had a copy of the traces on the FDR foil.
There was not any "digital" data until someone took a very close look at those traces, and wrote down specific values for each trace at some "time" (whatever that means in this context). Hopefully, they identified the traces correctly and had and used the correct "scales" and values for each trace.
The above was very time consuming and some people probably made a career out of some of the more complex data traces.
In aircraft flight test projects in the 1960s, some data was usually radioed back to the test facility and available to the people in the radio communications room in real time. But much of the flight test data was recorded on-board the aircraft and then ran through a computer program that reduced the data and applied appropriate corrections to that data, with the result that the engineers received a computer print-out of everything. But even the computer print-out required a lot of work from the engineers.
The flight test instrumentation was more complex than the data recorded on an FDR, and your available budget determined the instrumentation that you were able to use. Ever program I ever worked on had a budget that ranged from "tight" to "vastly underfunded".
