Originally Posted by
Centaurus
A warning from personal experience at Alice Springs many years ago. An incident report was filed by myself which resulted in me being blamed by BASIS.CAA? . The Departmental investigator provided "proof" by way of a written copy of tape transcripts between myself in a Departmental F27 engaged on navaid testing, an Ansett B727 in the circuit, and ATC.
On reading the paper transcripts furnished by the investigator I realised that whoever did the transcription from the ATC tapes had little idea of R/T language and had included words which I had certainly never made but which he thought I made and which in turn completely changed the meaning of what actually happened.
For example one written transcript showed the words as "Are we clear?"
However the ATC tape showed I said "Airways Clearance."
There were other "fake words" written in the transcript wrongly interpreted by whoever did the transcript from the ATC tapes.
My advice from that experience is that a pilot undergoing a grilling for a perceived violation, where evidence is produced by way of a written transcript from ATC or other sources, should demand to listen to the actual tape recording, rather than meekly accept what someone has transcribed to paper.
A similar thing happened in the ‘investigation’ of the NGA ditching.
The report contained supposed transcripts of weather information transmitted to NGA. The report quoted e.g. “999” as part of a weather information transmission. The report did not say whether the original words were “nine hundred and ninety nine” or “nine nine nine” or “niner niner niner”. Whetever the case, there was a patent error in either the transcription or the weather information transmission - there was a digit missing....
As I recall, this was not the only patent error.
Unless I hear CVR or ATS tapes myself, I’m dubious of the accuracy of transcripts.