The following is a summary from Mr. Butsch:

All times with the exception of the one from the Mission Control audio transcript are GMT. Only EOC2-4-0018 (my video), EOC2-4-0024, and EOC2-4-0118 are considered here, although others may have been affected by the timing correction. To keep things simple, only the "Debris A" event is considered, although other event times were affected by the correction (Debris A was the first event of Columbia's final breakup that was documented on video; although the CAIB investigation never officially identified it, it almost certainly was the separation of a significant portion of the left wing).

By the Tuesday following the accident I had an estimate of 13:59:44 as the time for the first frame in which Columbia is visible in my video (which is also the first frame of the video). This time estimate was accomplished by comparing my camera's time of day clock with the one on my cable TV converter box on the day of the accident using a stopwatch, later comparing the cable converter to the Weather Channel, and then comparing all of this (by ear) to WWV.

On March 13 I saw the CAIB's Rev 15 Time Line laid out on a map on a NASA Web site. I could identify EOC2-4-0018 as my video based on its position on the map. Its start time was shown as 13:59:59, which confused me. I studied the map for a few days before it occurred to me that my initial line of sight appeared to be misrepresented, which another look at my video confirmed based on visible ground structure (this essentially was the point at which I became confident that the investigators had made some sort of error).

The same mapped time line showed the start time for 0024, which I had previously viewed on the Internet and felt to be almost identical to mine from the point of view of timing, as 14:00:00. The time for Debris A was shown as 14:00:04 +/- 2 sec.

Because my video and 0024 both were specified as documenting Debris A, if the investigation's start time and direction for mine were indeed incorrect then the same necessarily would have to be the case for 0024. EOC2-4-0118 was also specified as documenting Debris A; and, although its information was not included on the mapped time line, there was an excellent chance that its timing and directions had been misinterpreted as well.

It was April 5 before I was successful in communicating my concerns to the investigation, and that was only by happenstance.

I then waited until late May, expecting to see revised numbers released. When that did not happen, and the CAIB appeared ready to start writing its final report, I contacted the investigators again only to discover that they still retained the 13:59:59 start time. After seeing my arguments against this on a Web page that I put up, they agreed to re-analyze the video. On June 9 they emailed me to say that, after re-analysis, the official start time had been changed to 13:59:44.5.

As a result the start time for 0024 would have become 13:59:45.5; and the start time for 0118, which I now knew originally had been 14:00:04, would have become 13:59:49.5. The new time for Debris A was specified as 13:59:47 +/- 1 sec. Initial lines of sight for the videos were, perforce, changed as well so that they now made more sense. This corrected information was incorporated (some of it rather vaguely) in the investigation's official documentation, including the CAIB Report. However, in some of the documentation where the incorrect information originally appeared it was not expunged. The careful student of the investigation is thus left to speculate on exactly what the heck is going on.

Robert Butsch (EOC2-4-0018)

July 2004