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| Union of Canadian Transport Employees Report |
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Contradiction between the CASB spokesman and the CASB's chief investigator on the "contents" of black box tapes:
Christiane Beaulieu, CASB spokesman on December 13, 1985. Speaking about the voice and flight data recorder tapes which had just been listened to for the first time at an NRC lab in Ottawa, Beaulieu said: "both tapes are readable despite severe damage that will take several days to repair". (see Exhibit 15)
Five weeks later, the Ottawa Citizen printed the following on the interpretation by chief investigator Peter Boag: "Boag announced earlier that the failure of the cockpit voice recorder will mean the loss of critical information that could have helped explain the disaster." (see Exhibit 17).
The day after the crash, responding from tests conducted by the NRC, Beaulieu said clearly "both tapes are readable". How then did this turn into the "loss of critical information" according to Boag 5 weeks later? If they were "readable" on December 13, 1985 then why were they not readable on January 20, 1986? If Beaulieu's interpretation was correct then no one, not even the members of the board of the CASB, have ever been able to "read" anything from these tapes since that date. In fact, the March 5, 1985 report of the Flight Recorder Group submitted by Dr. S.R.M. Sinclair, head of the laboratory at the N.R.C. says the following:
"The cockpit area microphone channel, although it contained some level of indeterminate wide band noise, did not have any of the normal crew conversation or background cockpit noise. Some very faint indecipherable voices were judged to be cross-talk from the pilots' audio channels". (see Exhibit 18)
Again, if Beaulieu's statement that "both tapes are readable" is correct, then how did the recordings turn into "indecipherable voices" by the time the NRC report was released in March, 1986.
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