The availability of flight data used in the maintenance of aircraft engines is enhanced by exporting data from the database of an engine condition monitoring program to a long term database. The data export is accomplished by first reading a time file to determine the last date and time that data was successfully exported to the destination database. The program database is then searched for data that is new or changed since the last successful export. Any data found in searching the program database is retrieved and exported to the destination database. After a successful export, the date and time of the successful export is updated in the time file.