President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, dies in Polish Air Force crash along with other officials

On 10 April 2010, a Polish Tupolev Tu-154M aircraft crashed just north of Smolensk, Russia, killing Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski and other officials, including the Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Army and senior military officers, the central bank governor, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and dignitaries in the government, vice-speakers and members of the upper and lower houses of the parliament and senior members of clergy of various denominations, on their way to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre.

The cause of the crash is under investigation, only preliminary information is available, and the information from the recovered black boxes has not yet been examined. According to reports based on comments of flight controllers on the ground, the pilot attempted four times to land at Smolensk-North air base in heavy fog, ignoring the advice of the ground control to divert to a safer airport in Minsk or Moscow. On the fourth attempt the plane struck trees 1.5 kilometres (0.9 mi) from the airfield and smashed into pieces across the wooded area.

All 97 passengers and crew aboard died, making this one of the deadliest disasters in Polish history and the most deadly aircraft disaster worldwide since the crash of Caspian Airlines Flight 7908 in July 2009.

Pilot ignoring advice from air traffic control

A mission control operator told Reuters anonymously “The pilot was advised to fly to Moscow or Minsk because of heavy fog, but he still decided to land. No one should have been landing in that fog.”

Alexandr Aleshin, the First Deputy Chief of the Main Staff of the Russian Air Force, said that the plane increased its descent rate and went below the glide slope 1.5 km (0.93 mi) from the runway. Controllers instructed the pilot to abort the approach; when he did not, controllers advised the aircraft to return to the reserve landing point. This order was repeated several times but the crew continued with the approach and crashed.

There is a speculation that the pilot tried to land repeatedly against controller advice because of a pressure from the delegation, eager to make the important ceremony. The President had not been invited to the joint Russian-Polish event that had happened three days earlier, which was attended by the Prime Ministers of Poland and Russia. In August 2008, a different pilot of Kaczynski’s plane was threatened with dismissal when he refused to land in Tbilisi during the South Ossetian war between Georgia and Russia.

On 23 January 2008, a Polish military plane with senior officers crashed under similar landing conditions. Improper crew selection, bad weather and pilot distraction were cited as the major causes as inexperienced pilots, trying to see the ground, failed to notice the plane’s losing altitude.

Lack of instrument landing system

The Smolensk-North, a former military air base now in mixed military-civilian use, does not have an instrument landing system[34] that would make a landing in dense fog a routine operation; the military cargo airplanes operated out of it can land and take-off without ILS, with only basic landing support in normal mode.

Source and Full Story : Wikipedia