This thread isn't about AF296, so let's keep this quick.
Thus far the only reference I can find to the phrase:
- Putain! Gauthier! Gauthier, il va bander! Hein?
is within Asseline's own written rebuttal ("Le pilote est-il coupable?" or "Is the pilot guilty?"). Seeing as it is a phrase that sticks in his memory:
"Pierre's reflection made me smile. It reminds me of the dispute he had with the Captain Jacques Gauthier, safety officer of Air France flights, following a low pass, with a Boeing 737 on the runway at Toulouse-Montaudran. In fact, during escorts aircraft to Air France workshops, this was common practice, the Head of Training Centre of the company not being the last to give the wrong example!
could it not be within the realms of possibility that it was M. Asseline or his lawyers themselves that leaked the phrase to the press based on his recollection rather than on the CVR?
The problem with events where press attention and scrutiny is so strong, is that who actually said what tends to become blurred in the retelling, and time (25 years now!) only serves to obscure things more. As mentioned above, the BEA is a civil service investigatory authority and is restricted in terms of the conclusions it can draw (even then, it could not apportion responsibility).
I'm also interested in the timescale we're talking here - "the day after..." what? The day after the accident there is simply no way that the BEA would have had even a draft transcript of the CVR ready to brief the press on it, so I would suspect that the only possible sources of the comment would be from an inadvertent ATC transmission, or from one of the others on the flight deck present to hear it.
[EDIT : One more thing. The idea of Airbus and the BEA somehow colluding off-the-record to point the finger at Asseline is in my opinion considerably undermined by the fact that the former allowed the latter to use their facilities at Toulouse to verify the veracity of Asseline's claims - some of which were correct, and those that were made their way into the report. Of the interested parties involved, it was Air France whose case was the most shaky (and indeed several deficiencies were found in the briefing materials supplied, not to mention the fact that their guidelines regarding displays diverged considerably from what was usually practised). Yet the people (and the union) who tried to champion Asseline's case seemed very reluctant to go after AF with the same vigour they did Airbus - a cynical interpretation of which would be that they weren't about to defecate where they eat (AF employing the lion's share of the union's members)...]