Federal investigators have recovered a video recorder from the wreckage of a tour helicopter that crashed Thursday on Molokai, killing all five people aboard, including visitors from Toronto and Pittsburgh.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Keith Holloway said the recorder has been sent to the NTSB laboratory in Washington, D.C., for examination.

"It appears to have significant damage, so we do not know what information, if any, we will be able to download," Holloway said Wednesday.

NTSB investigator Dennis Hogenson said the video recorder belonged to Blue Hawaiian Helicopters, operator of the tour aircraft that crashed behind Kilohana Elementary School.

Killed were Toronto businessman Stuart Robertson, 50; his companion, Eva Birgitta Wannersjo, 47, an accounting assistant; pilot Nathan Cline, 30, of Kihei; and Pittsburgh honeymooners Michael Todd Abel, 25, and Nicole Belivacqua-Abel, 28.

Blue Hawaiian Helicopters routinely records video of its flights and transfers it to DVD for sale to passengers.

"Brief takes are made of passengers during the tour to capture expressions to what you are seeing," Blue Hawaiian’s website says. "All music, pilot narration and the microphone communication between you and the pilot are recorded."

Holloway said the helicopter did not have a "black box" — a voice and flight information recorder that is heat-resistant and capable of enduring a high-speed impact.

Flight information recorders, used to record the pilots’ communications and other flight data, are standard equipment on large commercial passenger aircraft but not on helicopters, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said.

Federal investigators routinely review information provided by flight data recorders to help determine the cause of crashes.

In 2009 the NTSB recommended requiring crash-resistant flight recorders on helicopters and all other newly manufactured, turbine-powered, nonexperimental aircraft.

The recommendations followed a fatal midair collision of two TV news helicopters in Phoenix in 2007 and the subsequent difficulty in gathering information about the crash.

But the FAA has decided against requiring all helicopters, including tour helicopters, to be equipped with black boxes.

The FAA issued a notice of proposed rule-making in October 2010 to install lightweight aircraft recording systems for all emergency medical service helicopter operations.

Aviation attorney James T. Crouse said the public should have the ability to know what caused a helicopter to crash and that having flight data information would help in investigations.

"We need to know why … helicopters crash, and the best way to do that is to have all the information on what’s going on," Crouse said.