Bruce says: "Sail, you've said a couple of times that the tie had two forms of titanium. I thought it had been resolved by Tom Kaye that there was only one, pure Ti, which you said was used at Boeing as paint in the finish of the SST wings."
Sail says: "The only thing Tom Kaye did was to make a wild and very bad guess that Boeing only used alloy titanium and the pure titanium found on the tie ruled out Boeing...."
Bruce responds:
Sail, your perspective on Tom's findings are in complete opposition to what I heard from Tom at the Portland Symposium in 2011. Then, Tom specifically said that the titanium the CS found on the tie was pure Ti, and that the public announcement that the tie contained titanium alloy was presented exclusively by Geoffrey and was wholly in error.
Further, Tom told me that how this happened was that the early test indications from the CS found spectrographic evidence that could have been Ti alloy, and Geoffrey "jumped the gun" with his announcement. However, Tom told me that these false indications were most likely due to chlorine and sulfur residues left on the tie by match-cigarette particles. The CS later proved definitively that the Ti shards were pure Ti, but the alloy angle stayed in the Cooper lore thanks to Geoffrey.