Russia Blames Polish Plane Crash on Pilots

It was the most tragic of events—Poland’s president and many of its highest officials all killed instantaneously when their plane crashed in a foggy Russian forest.

Nine months later, as Poles are still coming to terms with the tragedy that killed 96 people, they received another blow: the final report from Russia’s investigation into the tragedy. In it, Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee blames the crash entirely on the inability of the Polish pilots and pressure from high officials.

According to the 184-page report published on Wednesday, there were serious shortcomings in the “professional training of the crew.”

“The crew for the VIP flight was formed without considering the actual level of training of each crew member,” the report states. According to Russian investigators the pilot and the rest of the crew had limited experience in flying the Soviet-built Tupolev-154 jet.

The plane carrying the then Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and many members of Poland’s political elite, crashed when the plane clipped the treetops as it approached Severnyi Airport in the city of Smolensk on April 10, 2009.

Pilots ignored warning messages for the plane to pull up and instructions from the control tower not to land. Visuals were extremely limited on that day due to heavy fog and bad weather conditions.

No blame has been placed on the Russian side.

Citing flight recordings from the cockpit, the investigators say that one of the passengers, commander-in-chief of the Polish air forces, was in the cockpit just before and at the moment of the crash, resulting in “psychological pressure on the crew members.”

“The presence of unauthorized persons in the cockpit who discussed with the crew the possible variants of continuing flight and the reaction of the main passenger induced psychological pressure on the crew and on the PIC [pilot in command] in the first place and increased high emotional stress,” according to the report.

The same claims were made almost directly after the plane crash. In particular in reference to an earlier incident in Georgia when President Lech Kaczynski described a pilot as a “coward” when he refused to land at an airstrip due to gunfire close to the airport.

“What we’re dealing with here is a whole host of speculations that are groundless. Some psychologists were apparently of the opinion that the pilots were being pressured, although there is no evidence of this on the flight data recorders nor in any documents,” Jaroslaw Kaczynski, former premier of Poland and twin brother of the late president, told Polish media TVN 24 broadcast on Wednesday.

Following his brother’s death, Jaroslaw Kaczynski ran for president but lost the elections to his rival, the man who was speaker of the Lower House at the time of the accident, Bronislaw Komorowski.

Komorowski’s administration has been critical of the late president and his administration, including issues related to the plane crash. Talking to TVN 24, Komorowski’s minister of internal affairs, Jerzy Miller, said “I’ve said before that the Polish report will be more critical of the Polish side than the Russian report.”

Although some fault is expected to be placed on Russia in the yet to be published Polish report, the largest opposition party led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski wants more emphasis on Russia as well as mistakes by made by the new government, including not demanding Russia handover the black boxes containing the flight recordings to Polish investigators soon enough.

Additional reporting by Tom Ozimek in Warsaw.