Comments on: Now It Makes More Sense

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 22:21:56 +0000

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.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:44:18 +0000

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… 😉

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:26:42 +0000

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.

By: John B.

John B. — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:17:23 +0000

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.