The vintage aircraft in Saturday’s deadly collision at a Dallas air show, as expected, lacked flight data recorders, making social media crucial to the investigation, a federal official indicated Sunday.

“Neither aircraft was equipped with a flight data recorder or a cockpit data recorder,” National Transportation Safety Board member Michael Graham said at a news conference Sunday.

Photos and videos of the collision at the Wings Over Dallas Airshow, which killed all six people on board the aircraft, could be “very critical, since we don’t have any flight data recorders,” he said.

While flight data recorders and other data devices, including cockpit recorders, are required for commercial airliners, they’re optional for most other air operations, including commuter, charter and tour flights, as well as most vintage aircraft, in which digital devices would often have to be adapted for mechanical flight control systems.

The design of the Boeing B–17G Flying Fortress in Saturday’s collision is nearly 90 years old. The other, a Bell P-63 Kingcobra, was a design Russia used during World War II.

The NTSB has been calling for wider mandates for flight data technology for decades, as it has evolved to become more powerful and less expensive.

“The NTSB believes other types of passenger-carrying commercial aircraft, such as charter planes and air tours, should be equipped with data, audio, and video recording devices,” the agency said in a text updated Oct. 28.

The board noted, “The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has not mandated that aircraft operators install [the technology], citing privacy, security, cost, and other concerns.”

Still, even under the NTSB’s wish list for improved crash data, such vintage aircraft weren’t singled out.

The NTSB says flight data technology, including cockpit voice recorders, or CVRs, can help investigators reconstruct the events leading to an accident and find a cause and help pilots and manufacturers avoid deadly mistakes.

The contemporary flight data recorder monitors at least 88 important parameters, including altitude, airspeed and aircraft attitude, data that typically allows the NTSB to build a computer-animated video reconstruction of the flight, according to the agency. A cockpit voice recorder “records the flight crew’s voices, as well as other sounds inside the cockpit,” the NTSB website says.