FRED Editor (Discontinued)
Learn More About FRED Files
NOTE: The FRED Editor is no longer offered or supported, but we will be continue to provide resources on FRED files in general and how you can edit files for your own use.
What is FRED?
The Flight Recorder Electronic Documentation (FRED) specification is a standard for interpreting flight recorder data. To make sense of flight data you need two parts: The flight data itself, and a “data map” which describes how the data is stored.
For several decades, companies have written their own closed, proprietary data map formats which has made collaboration difficult between government organizations, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers.
Engineers at Transport Canada took the first steps towards establishing an open standard for storing flight data map information. Originally known as the Flight Recorder Configuration Standard (FRCS), it was formalized through ARINC working groups and was officially specified as ARINC 647.
Switching to an open XML-based format brings several benefits:
- File changes can easily be compared using standard text comparison tools.
- The FRED standard contains sections for customization such as mathematical functions and algorithms unique to your data encoding needs.
- Open standards promote improved collaboration between organizations.
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