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There only a Few Occasions when flight crews have neem up for severe penalty when downloading the DFDR. Every one I know of in the last 11 years has been where a Major occurrence has occurred and the pilots elected for whatever reason to NOT tell the "entire story" i.e. a 737-322 on a takeoff roll and would not rotate where the pilots didn't state they had been de-iced and failed to reset the Horizontal stab trim from full nose down.. (FDR data got the capt. demoted) An A320 that missed the CAT3 approach into GEG where the pilot never engaged the autothrottle and THREE TIMES and diverted to SEA claiming the Autopilot Cat 3 dual would not engage. (The Airplane Reported him) An A320 that lost the Autopilot on climg out of LAX and the Capt. Diverted back to LAX claiming the Rudder PCU kicked hard Over.. ( the Airbus doesn't Have a Rudder PCU) There were others whe I don't know the outcome but I know the Pilots too a LOT of heat for these incidents. It is probable that these things might NOT have been a Major problem had the crew "fessed up".But!
Once the airplane is grounded and the NTSB or FAA is involved the situation cannot be abated because it is "assumed" that Maintenence was at fault!
United Flight Safety will pull the FDR first thing to determine the cause.
and the Chips fall where they may. Nobody will fault a pilot for a suspected overspeed because they can be verified as such but when they DON'T report an overspeed?? Whew! Bad news!! It's FAR better to say you Did and let Mantenence do a quick check to See what it's NOT than Not say something that turns out to BE a "big deal".

 

And, before FOQA the FDR was always fair game.

TWA monitored every leg of every flight except perhaps for the first few years of my career. If they saw what they considered to be an out of parameter operation they would place the data in the affected pilot's mail box along with a buck slip from the chief pilot or a flight manager with a nice, polite reminder to be more careful.

Since I never got one of those it must have been pretty loose.

 

Many airlines have MOU's on the FDR data and its use in FOQA programs.

Many good things have transpired from FOQA. Approaches have been redesigned. Best practices have identified items that need to be fixed and ultimately safety has been approved.

The issue with CVR data is the ability to listen to every word spoken. You make some benign comment that get reviewed you will be subject to disciplinary action. State check instead of checklist and are identified as a problem child, it is technically a violation of SOP's.
We has pilots need to keep the self policing of our ranks. Give this up allow third party after the fact disciplinary action you are giving away more of this profession that you can possibly see.

If this crap passes, we should petition that we are technically in a jeopardy event every second of every minute we are in the flight deck, ergo, no more checkrides.

 

I know exactly what FOQA is. This bill removes our protections that have been negotiated keeping us from discipline involving CVR AND FDR.

All those contractual provisions involving FOQA data making it deidentified and such will be void. Management will have full ability to see WHO it is that has all those FOQA events and they'll have congressional legislation telling them its ok to terminate you if they choose to do so based on what they see in that data.

FOQA won't be blind anymore. They're going to be able to do the exact same thing with FDR data that they can do with CVR data, except CVR data takes a huge amount of resources to analyze whereas FDR data can be analyzed very quickly, cheaply, and precisely.

 

And some airline flat out had it written into their CBA's years ago. No need for a MOU/LOA/side letter.