A system and method of storing and recovering a flight plan includes loading flight plan data into working memory of an aircraft flight management system (FMS). When the FMS determines that a storage triggering event has occurred, a copy of at least a portion of the flight plan data is transmitted from the working memory to a non-volatile storage medium. A display command is supplied to a display device, at least following recovery of the FMS from a severe reset, that causes the display device to render a retrieval prompt. A retrieval command is received at the FMS, via a user input device, that causes the FMS to retrieve the at least a portion of the flight plan data from the non-volatile memory and store it in the working memory.