Thomas G. Goduto Interview, 20 February 2001
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| INT: | If it were behind the airplane would that be a factor? | |
| TG: | No, my equipment received all the way around. | |
| INT: | If McCaslin's got this on his radarscope and it's a large object and he knows that it approached the plane very quickly from behind, you would think that your devices would have some way of detecting that same object. | |
| TG: | If there was an emission from that object and it was in— | |
| INT: | Only if it was emitting? | |
| TG: | Yeah. Whatever kind of emission it'd be—whether it was an intentional emission or just a circumstantial emission because of whatever the object was, and it happened to have been in the frequency range of what I was able to view or listen to. I think that Jim told me that Pat McCaslin said that the EW said he had some strange signals. | |
| INT: | Yeah. | |
| TG: | I don't believe I would've said, 'I've got some strange signals' and whatever. I might've said, 'I've got signals' and his interpretation of that might've been that I was receiving some odd stuff. But to this day I'd have to say that I could not substantiate anything on my equipment that was unusual.
At some point prior to the full stop landing I would've shut the equipment so that the power requirements of the aircraft were available for other things. And we penetrated. Penetrated means you hit this fix and you put the gear down and you start a descent and headings into your drop and panned up on your final approach course. And again, whether it was the first time or the second time, the navigators or the co-pilot or both said, 'Whatever that is, it's staying right with us.' Okay. Now this is the time also that, after talking to Jim I recalled that we did have UHF problems. Now don't forget, I told you that the antennas were in different positions for the different radios—radio 1, radio 2. And sometimes you had to switch the radios and you had a better response. And reading the transcript after my first interview with Jim, I could see where the approach control lost contact with us. In other words, they would transmit to us and we wouldn't hear it. Well we didn't know we had radio problems because we weren't hearing anything. Only after a certain period of time would go by if we haven't heard something you'd suspect, you know, you'd probably say, 'Minot approach, are you reading this radio?' And then if they didn't |
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