Polish Pesident Dies in Crash

[IBPilot]

Here are some photos from the flight path.

From the looks of it the aircraft was flying below the elevation of the runway

In the elevation display they show the aircraft at 2.5 meters with landing gear marks in the grass
at the 244 meter elevation. (runway elevation was at 254 meter above sea level!!!!)

(note-- the landing gear is 2.5 meters high on the aircraft)

Wow... I just finished looking at the flightpath daigram and I gotta be honest, I was intrigued to see that the aircraft was flying well below the elevation of the runway. Could a possible reason be that the pilots were flying low to maintain a visual of the ground? Is that the reasoning or is it still a mystury as to their extremely low altitudes??

[Sheila]

http://birdflu666.wordpress.com/2010/04 ... -gas-deal/

Wonder why we never heard about the gas deal ?

[Fredster]

where did you get that info hawker driver ?

[hawker driver]

The info comes from http://www.pprune.org

There are already 970 posts on the topic.

[Brize]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7ruqiG-Bx0

This is interesting. I can speak Polish and can hear some very odd things being said by the voices in the video, as well as possible gunshots and laughter. At one point I can hear someone yell, "Alive!", "Kill", "Change of plans F*%^$r" shots, something seems to spook the russian speaking camera man and someone calls him scum. Rumours are out that the man who took the video was stabbed to death.

[lionheart27]

Regardless of the conspirasy theories it seems that there might be a discrepency between the Western style ILS and the Russian style ILS systems. Do not know why the A/C's systems were made to reflect western styles unless it was exclusively used for landing at airports using those systems. The fog compounds the issue of the TAWS and the pilots establishing a visual approach making it a CFIT.

Interesting that this is not the first time that a Polish Official (Prime Minister/President) was killed in a plane crash. Władysław Sikorski was killed in a Liberator crash in 1943 under mysterious circumstances. No wonder the conspiracy theories are still around. It could be a rehash of the relations between Poland and Russia breaking down from incidents happening some 65 yrs ago.

[Cougar]

I just got this from Flightaware... the voices of passengers were on the cockpit recording...


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/world ... oland.html

[golden hawk]

Black boxes in Polish crash reveal pilots warned
The April plane crash killed Poland President Lech Kaczynski


By DAVID NOWAK, VANESSA GERA

updated 12:50 p.m. PT, Tues., June 1, 2010
WARSAW, Poland - Poland published cockpit conversations Tuesday of the final minutes before the April plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski, revealing that pilots decided to land in heavy fog despite warnings from air traffic controllers about poor visibility.

A transcript of the last 39 minutes of the flight also shows that a Foreign Ministry official, Mariusz Kazana, entered the cockpit and made remarks indicating that the president was involved in deciding whether or not to make the difficult landing.

There have been suspicions in Poland that Kaczynski might have pressured the pilot and co-pilot to risk a dangerous landing to keep from being late to a memorial ceremony for Poles massacred by the Soviet Union 70 years ago.

The black boxes, which contain some indecipherable information, do not settle that matter definitively, but they do suggest that the pilots might have been distracted by the presence in the cockpit of non-crew members.

According to the transcript, the dangers became clear about 25 minutes before landing, when an air traffic official told the Polish crew: "the conditions for landing do not exist."

'Then we have a problem'
Later, Kazana, the chief of diplomatic protocol, entered the cockpit and Capt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk told him: "Sir, the fog is increasing. At the moment, under these conditions that we have now, we will not manage to land."

Kazana is quoted as answering: "well, then we have a problem."

"We can hover around for half an hour and then fly off to a backup" airport, the captain replies, later naming Minsk and Vitebsk, two cities in Belarus, as backup options. The crew was also told by the Russian control tower that a Russian Ilyushin plane had abandoned two landing attempts and had flown to another airport.

It's not clear if Kazana left the cockpit and then returned, but a few minutes later he says: "there isn't a decision from the president yet about what to do next."

Polish and Russian investigators have not yet drawn final conclusions about what caused the crash that killed Kaczynski and 95 others, many of them top civilian and military leaders, but evidence has so far pointed to pilot error and bad weather conditions, and the black box recordings seem to further support that theory.

The government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk was eager to publish the report in order to quell suspicions about the cause of the crash and conspiracy theories that have surfaced in the tabloids. Some Polish tabloids have suggested that Russia has something to hide, even though Polish officials have repeatedly praised how Russians have responded and helped investigate the tragedy.

The 40-page transcript, released in Russian and Polish, showed that the plane's warning system told pilots in the two minutes before the crash outside the western Russian city of Smolensk that terrain was ahead and urged them eight times in the final 16 seconds of the flight to "pull up, pull up" — instructions the pilots did not heed until it was too late.

When one wing clipped a tree, which caused the plane to flip and crash, voices in the cockpit screamed and cursed. That was the last information recorded on the black boxes, which then fall silent.

The pilots were warned several times by air traffic control officials that visibility in the fog was limited to about 1,300 feet (400 meters).

The transcript also shows that the pilots were communicating with the crew of a plane carrying Polish journalists that landed at the airport earlier that morning. They mainly discussed the thick fog, with the crew that landed earlier saying that that situation has worsened, but also saying the plane carrying the president could try to land.

Edmund Klich, Poland's envoy to the investigation, confirmed last week that one of two voices in the cockpit not belonging to a crew member was that of the Polish Air Force commander, Gen. Andrzej Blasik. The transcript refers to the presence of Blasik in the cockpit, but does not attribute any words to him.

Klich said that Blasik spent a few minutes in the cockpit and remained there until the end. "He wanted to know what the situation was," Klich said.

Klich said that psychologists were trying to determine if Blasik's presence in the cockpit pressured the pilots to attempt a risky landing.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37453605/ns ... ws-europe/

[JordanRHughes]

This is very sad.

RIP

[Mig29]

Update on Polish presidential plane crash last year...

Polish Pilots `Under Pressure' to Land Before Kaczynski Crash, Russia Says

The pilots of a Polish airliner that crashed last year in Russia killing President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others were under “psychological pressure” to land in heavy fog, Russian investigators said today.

The commander of Poland’s air force, General Andrzej Blasik, was in the cockpit at the time of the crash and had alcohol in his blood, Tatyana Anodina, chairman of the Interstate Aviation Committee, or MAK, told reporters in Moscow. The April 10 disaster in Smolensk, Russia, wasn’t caused by mechanical failure, and the pilots bear sole responsibility for the decision to land, she said.

“The presence of the air force commander, the president and top officials on the flight by itself created psychological pressure,” Alexei Morozov, head of the MAK technical commission, said at the briefing. “The principle of a sterile cockpit was violated.”

The investigation has sparked tensions in Poland, where Prime Minister Donald Tusk previously said a draft report on the crash was “unacceptable” because it didn’t discuss areas of Russian responsibility. Tusk cut short a winter vacation to return to Warsaw, where he will meet with Interior Minister Jerzy Miller, who is supervising an independent investigation, before speaking to the media, spokesman Grzegorz Szymanski said.

The crash resulted from a “complex” series of errors and shortcomings on both the Polish and Russian sides, Miller told reporters today in Warsaw. Miller said he will brief Tusk on the Russian report, and Poland’s investigation will continue.

Pushing Their Luck

The disaster, which also killed central bank Governor Slawomir Skrzypek and four top military commanders, touched off weeks of public mourning in Poland. The Tupolev-154 crashed as Poland’s leaders traveled to Russia to commemorate 22,000 Polish prisoners killed by Soviet secret police in 1940.

The pilot “didn’t want to let anybody down,” said David Learmount, operations and safety editor at Flight Global in London. “He thought he could push his luck a little bit and get away with it. Aviation history is littered with people that do exactly this.”

Poland submitted a 148-page document to the MAK on Dec. 19 pointing out inadequacies in the draft report. Among the issues listed were a lack of precise information on equipment at the Smolensk airport and missing records of phone conversations between air traffic controllers and their superiors in Moscow.

Report ‘Incomplete’

Investigators took the Polish comments into account before releasing the report, Morozov said. Russian and Polish officials examined 370 pieces of evidence and reviewed 20,000 pages of documents before reaching their conclusions, Anodina said.

Edmund Klich, Poland’s envoy to the MAK investigation, said publication of transcripts of conversations between air traffic controllers in Smolensk would show the controllers were under pressure to let the plane land and avoid a diplomatic incident.

“It’s always easiest to pin the blame on the pilots,” Klich said in comments broadcast on TVN24. “The report we have is incomplete.”

According to the Russian report, one mistake was the crew’s use of the radio altimeter, rather than the barometric unit. This resulted in incorrect altitude readings as the plane passed over a ravine near the airport, according to the report.

The Russian report isn’t the first to raise the idea that the pilot was under pressure to land regardless of conditions.

Presidential Pressure

Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza reported in April that a pilot flying Kaczynski to Georgia in 2008 refused an order to land in Tbilisi because of the country’s war with Russia, diverting instead to Azerbaijan. Kaczynski later criticized the action, saying that someone who decides to be an officer “cannot be timid,” the newspaper reported.

Morozov said the conclusion that the crew on the Smolensk flight was under psychological pressure was reached by a team of Russian and Polish psychologists and was borne out by cockpit transcripts.

“The navigator’s remark, ‘He’ll go crazy,’ is evidence that the aircraft’s captain and the whole crew were in a psychologically difficult position,” Morozov said. “It’s clear that in the event of an unsuccessful approach and a landing at an alternative airfield, the captain expected a negative reaction from the main passenger.”

Investigators listening to the cockpit recordings “didn’t hear a direct command from the president” to land the plane, Morozov said.

‘Soviet Mentality’

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, brother of the late president and head of Poland’s largest opposition party, Law & Justice, said MAK’s findings were “speculation.”

Russian investigators’ mention of Blasik’s blood alcohol reading of 0.06 percent, below the legal limit for drivers in the U.S. and U.K. but above the Polish and Russian thresholds, drew criticism from Kaczynski’s party colleagues.

“Today we’ve seen the Soviet mentality in all its clarity,” Karol Karski, a lawmaker who accompanied Jaroslaw Kaczynski to Smolensk to identify the president’s body, said by phone. “This report did nothing but shift the responsibility as far as possible from the Russians and put the blame on the dead.”

Relations between Russia and Poland began to improve after the disaster, with Russia opening its files on the 1940 massacre as a sign of goodwill.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev attended Kaczynski’s burial in Krakow. Medvedev met Kaczynski’s successor, Bronislaw Komorowski, last month in Warsaw during the first official visit of a Russian head of state to Poland since January 2002.


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-1 ... -says.html

[PS-90A]

English version of this document begins on page 3...

http://www.mak.ru/russian/investigation ... komend.pdf

Very sad...

[PS-90A]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-ayk4Do70

This is horrible...

God Bless everyone, fly safe people...