International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / A need exists to provide a flexible data reduction tool that minimizes software development costs and reduces analysis time for telemetry data. The Common Airborne Processing System (CAPS), developed by the Freeman Computer Sciences Center at Eglin AFB, Florida, provides a generalpurpose data reduction capability for digitally recorded data on a PC. Data from virtually any kind of MIL-STD-1553 message or Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) frame can be extracted and converted to engineering units using a parameter dictionary that describes the data format. The extracted data can then be written to a file, ASCII or binary, with a great deal of flexibility in the output format. CAPS has become the standard for digitally recorded data reduction on a PC at Eglin. New features, such as composing derived parameters using mathematical expressions, are being added to CAPS to make it an even more productive data reduction tool. This paper provides a conceptual overview of the CAPS version 2.3 software.