Special Report: Air India Flight 182 (Page- 6)

The remaining wreckage of Flight 182 lay on the sea bed at a depth of 6,700ft and its retrieval would be difficult if not impossible. In preparation for a recovery attempt the Canadian Coast Guard vessel John Cabot began combing the area, taking video film of the debris on the bottom and shooting thousands of still photographs. Over the month of July, fortunately in unusually calm weather, the painstaking process of mapping the wreckage distribution was begun. It would be many weeks before it was completed. On 16 July. the CVR andthe FDR boxes were opened in Bombay and their contents analysed in the presence of international safety experts. The results were startling. At precisely 07.13:01 hrs, the exact moment of the break-up, both recordings had stopped abruptly. Flight 182's electrical power supplying vital components had been completely and instantly severed. The electrics bay must have been totally destroyed. This sudden loss of electrical power was in keeping with analysis of the Shannon ATCC tape and with the abrupt disappearance of the radar 'target. Whatever had happened at 31,000ft out over the Atlantic was sudden and catastrophic indeed. Meanwhile, in Canada and Japan, a full-scale investigation of the Air India crash and the blast at Narita was being instigated by RCMP and Japanese police. At first glance there appeared little to connect the two incidents, although Canada obviously seemed to be the linking factor. If Kanishka had been destroyed by a bomb, the answer could lie in Toronto or Montreal, the departure points of Air India's I8I/2, or in Vancouver, the departure city of CP Air's 003.