[en] Ultrasonic testing is widely used for detecting, locating and sizing flaws in primary circuit elements at various stages of plant life. The successive PISC projects have constituted the most notable sustained international effort to assess the effectiveness of these inspection techniques. The Plate Inspection Steering Committee (PISC-I) programme (1976-1980) was intended to establish the capabilities of the 1974 ASME Code Section XI ultrasonic procedure. The Programme for the Inspection of Steel Components (PISC-II, 1981-1986) constitutes a more profound evaluation of the best performance obtainable by modern ultrasonic techniques under optimal conditions. Destructive examination being the only way to obtain a precise reference data to compare the results of NDT techniques, the present report describes the establishment of references for the evaluation of the PISC-II trials results: destructive and complementary non destructive examination of the four PISC-II plates