The voice of an Air-India Flight 182 crew member reverberated through a B.C. courtroom yesterday as members of the victims' families listened intently to a recording of his final words.
The unidentified crew member was talking to Michael Quinn, who was an air traffic controller at Shannon airport in Ireland, moments before the aircraft was blown out of the sky on June 23, 1985.
A voice from the Air-India cockpit started up with "Air-India 182 Good Morning." The crew changed the radio frequency for their communications. They confirmed the flight plan through Irish air space.
"Right sir, squawking 2005, 182," the Air-India pilot was heard to say.
Then a squelching noise. Then silence.
After several seconds, Mr. Quinn tried to make contact with the flight. "Air-India 182 Shannon, Air-India 182 Shannon," he said, repeatedly, with increasing panic in his voice.
Mr. Quinn told the court yesterday the flight had disappeared from the radar screen in front of him in the control tower.
"But there's always a chance the flight is still flying," he said, in explanation of why he kept calling out to the silence.
As the moments of silence stretched out in the courtroom, family members of the victims looked straight ahead or at the floor, away from the two men accused of planting a bomb on the plane. One family member dabbed his eyes, others had their eyes closed.
Mr. Quinn was also heard on the tape contacting crew from other aircraft in the area, asking them whether they saw Flight 182.
Ten minutes after his final communications with the Air-India flight, he spoke to a pilot on a flight of now-defunct TWA, asking him to descend to a lower flight level. The pilot reported seeing a vapour trail but no airplane.
Mr. Quinn asked the pilot to turn around and go back to look for the missing flight. But after a few minutes, the pilot asked for permission to head on to London as the aircraft did not have enough fuel to search for the Air-India plane. Mr. Quinn also tried to enlist the help of a British Airways flight.
Mr. Quinn told the court that the Air-India flight was travelling at about 850 kilometres per hour when its radar signal disappeared. The control tower had received no emergency calls of any kind from Air-India, he said.
Two B.C. men -- Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri -- have been charged with murder for the death of 329 people killed when Flight 182 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 23, 1985. They have also been charged with the murder of two men killed at Tokyo's Narita airport 54 minutes earlier.
The prosecution alleges the men were part of a conspiracy to plant bombs on Air-India flights.
Earlier yesterday, Dhimiri Berumal Rajendra, an Air-India maintenance manager in Toronto and Montreal at the time of the disaster, testified that the aircraft was mechanically sound when it left Canada.
"One-hundred-per-cent safe," he told the court.
The trial continues.