The Crash At Smolensk

While the BBC, as usual, has a lot of information in its article, Polish President Lech Kaczynski dies in plane crash, the most complete coverage can be found on Wikipedia.

First off, the passenger list showed 89 passengers, but one didn’t make the flight. There were also 8 crew members, which is why the Russians reported 97 people lost.

All of the senior members of the Polish Defense Ministry, except the Defense Minister, died in the crash, i.e. the President, their Chairman of their Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Chiefs of Staff of military services. [The Wiki article has a more complete listing than I’ve seen elsewhere.]

The aircraft was one of two Tu-154Ms, used by the Polish Air Force’s 36th Special Aviation Regiment for VIP flights. The aircraft is very similar to the Boeing 727.

Initial reports indicate that the aircraft hit trees short of the runway at Smolensk in heavy fog. The Russians said that they recommended that the aircraft divert to Moscow or Minsk because of the fog, but the pilot chose to make the attempt.

While I’m sure the crash will probably be listed as pilot error, this isn’t that simple. President Kaczynski had earlier threatened to dismiss the pilot on a flight to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, for not wanting to land because of the hostilities between Georgian and Russian forces. The pilot in the crash would know about that.

The reporting indicated that the aircraft crashed on its fourth attempt to land. Seasoned pilots might make two attempts, but the fact there were four would indicate that this wasn’t the pilot’s decision.

The airport was a former Soviet military air base which doesn’t have an Instrument Landing System [ILS] but depends on Ground Controlled Approach [GCA] for bad weather landings. A GCA landing is a voice system with ground-based radar providing the controller with the altitude and course of the approaching aircraft, and the pilot being informed of his position on the landing. You have probably seen this on TV or the movies, with the man on the ground telling the pilot that the aircraft in on or off course, and is over, under, or on the glide path.

That the aircraft was on its fourth attempt indicates that the communications between the air and ground were not going smoothly. Russian and Polish are both Slavic languages, but they are definitely not the same language. I assume that the pilot was getting readings on his instruments that were at variance with what the group controller was telling him, regarding altitude, and the pilot decided that his instruments were right and the ground controller was wrong. If so, it was a fatal mistake, as the aircraft was below the glide path and struck trees and then the ground short of the runway.

To understand why all of the Joint Chiefs were on that flight, you need to understand what the Katyn Forest Massacre was all about. Stalin ordered the execution of all Polish officers in Soviet POW camps in 1940. The Soviets denied that they were responsible for decades. This was to be the first major memorial on the 70th anniversary of the massacre.

This was a prime example of why you do not have large groups of government officials travel on the same aircraft.