Crew knew Polish flight was doomed, says official

COCKPIT VOICE recordings have revealed that the crew of the Polish aircraft that crashed last Saturday, killing president Lech Kaczynski and 95 other people, realised the plane was doomed seconds before it smashed into the ground near Russia’s Smolensk airport.

Polish investigators promised to make public as much information as possible from the black boxes salvaged from the wreckage of the aircraft, as Russian sources blamed pilot error for the disaster, which claimed the lives of dozens of Polish officials and top military men.

Russian investigators said they had found no evidence that the pilots had been pressured to land at fog-bound Smolensk airport by Mr Kaczynski or one of his entourage, even as Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko said the Polish leader must have given such an order.

“The crew was aware of the inevitability of the coming catastrophe, if only due to the plane shaking as the wings hit the trees,” said Poland’s chief prosecutor Andrzej Seremet.

The Russian-built Tupolev 154 aircraft plunged into woods as it tried to land at Smolensk airport, from where Mr Kaczynski and his delegation were due to travel to a commemoration ceremony at nearby Katyn, where Soviet secret police massacred over 20,000 Polish officers in April 1940.

Polish prosecutor Zbigniew Rzepa said the voice recordings “were dramatic” but declined to elaborate on their content, while Mr Seremet said they would “be vital in terms of proving or disproving the various hypotheses. I will not oppose revealing the contents unless they are of an intimate nature.”

A source close to the investigation told Russia’s Interfax news agency that information from the black boxes showed that “an error in piloting led to the disaster”.

The unnamed source said the pilots apparently had not taken into account that “a feature of this aircraft is that if the speed of its descent is greater than six metres per second, when levelling out and moving to horizontal flight the aircraft drops somewhat. This means that it loses altitude far quicker than usual.”

The source added that “so far there is no evidence that any of the high-ranking passengers demanded that the pilots land at Smolensk”.

Air traffic controllers say they urged the crew to divert to Moscow or Minsk, the capital of Belarus, but were ignored.

“It is clear who is responsible for this,” said Belarus leader Mr Lukashenko, who had a frosty relationship with the controversial Mr Kaczynski.

“The president . . . has the final say, it’s he who decides whether the plane is to land or not.”

In 2008, Mr Kaczynski castigated one of his pilots and branded him a coward for refusing to land in Georgia during its brief war with Russia.