Experimental observations indicate that when a bounded beam of ultrasound is incident upon a plane liquid–solid interface at the Rayleigh angle there is a significant amount of radiation backscattered in the direction of the incident wave. Recently this phenomenon was explained in terms of a backward propagating leaky Rayleigh wave. We show here that in a pulse‐echo mode of operation thefowardpropagating leaky Rayleigh wave is likely to a give a much larger contribution to the signal received at the transducer than the correspondingbackwardwave.