Primarily it is for anything that might go wrong during flight. Think of it like an airplanes "black box". The Phantom has internal storage on the aircraft as well, very similar to that. The data that is transmitted back to the device from the aircraft is only a small portion of that. But it is very useful in determining faults as well as monitoring for stability of the aircraft batteries....etc..and so forth.Never understood the flight record thing, what does it matter?