A member of the Russian investigation team has said that there is no evidence that any of the passengers of the doomed plane that crashed last Saturday killing all 96 on board forced the pilot to land at Smolensk airport.
The Russian Interfax news agency quotes an unnamed official from the investigative team as saying: “Until now we can find no evidence that a high ranking politician on board the Tupolev plane asked to land at the airport.”
“Analysis of records of conversations of the crew has not shown that they had been under any pressure," the investigator added.
In was speculated in the aftermath of the plane crash last weekend that the pilot of the plane taking President Kaczynski and others to a WW II Katyn massacre anniversary ceremony had come under pressure from someone on board to land in Smolensk, despite atrocious weather conditions.
Yesterday the Russian Kommersant daily reported another investigator as saying that the TU-154 made an attempt to land in, not just bad but, “extreme” weather conditions.
“The risk of a crash in such weather conditions was extremely high. The pilot must have known about it but for an unknown reason and contrary to flying instructions and common sense, decided to attempt to land,” the newspaper quotes an anonymous Russian expert from the investigative commission.
Thick fog
According to Kommersant, Smolensk was covered with very thick fog, rising 30 metres above ground, which limited visibility to 200 to 400 metres. A plane travelling at 150 to 180 metres per second normally covers such a distance in just a few seconds, which means that the crew descended into the unknown as they approached the airport.
The newspaper claims that the pilots were not able to use an on-board navigation system, which displays flight trajectory, because the military airport in Smolensk is not equipped with the Instrument Landing System (ILS). Instead, it has a rather primitive OSP system, which shows only landmarks that a plane went past.
However, in order to use the OSP system 1,800-metre visibility is required and fog must not rise less than 120 metres above the ground.
Kommersant writes that the air control centre warned the Polish pilots and suggested diverting the plane to Minsk or Moscow but the chief pilot insisted on taking a final decision at a critical point, which for a Tu-154 is 100 metres above the ground.
“We are all guilty of this tragedy, we cannot only blame the pilots,” employees of the airport in Smolensk told the newspaper and adds that because of the bad weather conditions they should have closed the airport but were too afraid of sparking another Russian-Polish diplomatic incident.
President Kaczynski and the other dignitaries who died on board were travelling to 70th anniversary commemorations ceremony of the Katyn massacre, when over 20,000 Poles died at the hands of Stalin’s NKVD. (pg/mg)