Aviation experts have been telling Polish Radio that the TU 154 transcripts published on the internet on Tuesday contain too many undecipherable parts to determine what caused the fatal crash on April 10. 

Colonel Piotr Lukasiewicz says that the transcript of the cockpit recordings must be juxtaposed with other recordings from the other black boxes: “Only then will it be possible to come to a relatively objective conclusion about what happened,” the Colonel said. 

Lukasiewicz added that it would also be possible for Polish experts to decode the black boxes themselves, although he was in doubt as to whether there are such decoders in Poland. 

Krzysztof Zalewski from the Lotnictwo aviation monthly points out that the transcript is only one of the elements that could explain the truth behind the Smolensk tragedy. 

“We still have [to check] the analysis of the flight parameters, and this needs to be put into the same timeframe [as the transcripts]. This is crucial, as then it would be possible to see what the pilots were doing; so if the systems were saying ‘pull up’, did the pilots in fact carry out this manoeuvre,” Zalewski told Polish Radio. 

‘Suicide on demand?’

Some aviation experts are shocked by what the transcripts appear to reveal, however. Wojciech Luczak, editor-in-chief of the Raport monthly, believes that it was in fact pilot error that caused the crash. 

Luczak says that a plane should not go beneath 100 metres when on approach for landing, and that if visibility is poor – the cloud base that fateful day in Smolensk was just 50 metres - then the landing should have been aborted. 

According to Luczak, the black box recordings show many errors which the pilots made, with the journalist calling it “suicide on demand.” “The crew put its own head and the heads of other passengers into the guillotine and pulled the handle,” the “Raport” chief exclaimed. (jb/pg)