Now It Makes More Sense
Maria Antonova who writes at Global Post has committed journalism by talking to people and consulting open sources to provide a more reasonable picture of the crash at Smolensk.
The most important piece of the puzzle she provides is the fact that the Ground Control Approach system at the Smolensk North airport did not have a working glide slope radar, so the aircraft was using its altimeter. In the same vein she reports that there was only one landing attempt, not the four that have been reported by other sources. The pilot told the ground controller that he would make one pass and if it was unsuccessful, he would divert to another airport.
The other piece of information needed was to locate the airport on a topographical map and see what the terrain was like around the airport.
With those pieces in place, the landing was pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster.
The airport sits on land that is more 200 meters above the surrounding lowlands. There are hills on both sides of it. If you are using your radar altimeter, it won’t react to the higher ground until it is too late to correct. If you set you regular altimeter to the barometric reading of the airport and compare your standard altimeter with the radar altimeter, it will look like your standard altimeter is off. Visibility was 400 meters in fog, so there was no way of seeing the problem until it was too late.
The ABC reports on the preliminary data from the “black boxes”. Essentially, Russian sources are saying that the data indicates that the aircraft was descending faster than is recommended, and continued to drop after the pilot tried to level out.
This effect is common in a lot of aircraft types, but is more pronounced in the Tu-154/Boeing 727 design. Jet engines have to spin up to increase power, so there is a time lag there, and the lower speed of landing is a bit tricky in those aircraft. Many of the design features that increase their in-flight speed, complicate low speed handling.
My personal opinion is that the pilot should not have attempted the approach in the absence of the glide slope radar.
4 comments
I flew Aeroflot several times in the mid ’80s. Every passenger jet I took was flown like a jet fighter: exceptionally steep, ramped-up take-offs; scarily steep ramped-down landings. It was, as I imagine, like being on a giant roller coaster. A local friend told me the reason was all the civilian planes in Russia were flown by ex-military pilots. “That’s the only way they know how to fly,” he said.
In the Soviet system Aeroflot was the Air Force Reserve and functioned like the military air transport command. In most of the former Eastern Bloc you find they still use “navigators” on airliners. The reason is that only officers of the security services were allowed to have access to accurate maps, or to know how to navigate from point to point. [Road signs are slowly being replaced to reflect reality, as they were intentionally distorted during the Soviet era “in case of invasion”.]
This definitely sounds like the pilot was making a “combat assault landing”, the sort of thing you do when you are landing at an airport where you expect gun fire, rather than the standard glide slope used for ILS or GCA landings. The Russian military stopped using the Smolensk field back in October of 2009, which explains why the radar wasn’t working.
Minsk is an hour away by bus. They should have diverted.
Try taking a flight in PNG! 😆 *THAT’S* scary. You need at least two spare pairs of underwear per flight! 😆 😉
But yeah… This tragedy was so obviously going to happen. *sigh*
Ya know… if this was the 60’s or 70’s… I’d say that Pilot was probably on a sanctioned suicide mission. But then again… Polish politicians wouldn’t have been anywhere near Smolensk or anything Soviet back then either. Russians have very long memories, whether real or imaginary. Just sayin… 😉
Most countries would have sent an advance team to scope out the situation before they put a huge segment of the government on the same plane. They should have gone to a major airport and then used ground transportation.