Russia blames Polish crew in crash that killed president Kaczynski

Russia has put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Polish pilots for the Smolensk air crash, which killed President Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria and 94 other passengers on the presidential plane last April. Russia's Interstate Aviation Committee’s investigators said that the Polish crew did not want to displease the president and hence decided to land the plane in the bad weather instead of diverting the plane to another airport.
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Poland's interior minister initially accepted the findings but later claimed that Russian air traffic controllers were also at fault. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who refused to accept Russia' s draft of the final report, cut short his vacations on Wednesday in response to the report and returned to capital to discuss the matter with his minister Jerzy Miller.

Kaczynski's twin brother Jaroslaw, meanwhile, strongly condemned the report and called it a "joke" against Poland. Jaroslaw said that Russians failed to produce evidence of pilots’ fault. Edmund Klich, Poland's representative at IAC also said that the report was not only incomplete but also contained errors.

He alleged that the role of air traffic controllers, who might have issued misleading commands, should also be included in the final report.

Klich also pointed out that the Russian controllers issued the command to abort landing very late and did not close the Smolensk airport due to bad weather on time, which were a few causes of the crash.

"The presence of the Polish air force commander on the flight deck up to the aircraft's impact with the ground put psychological pressure on the crew captain to decide on continuing descent in a situation of unjustified risk, dominated by the goal of making a landing at any cost," Tatyana Anodina, Head of the Inter-state Aviation Committee in Moscow told reporters.

She added that the Tu-154 airliner was in good condition at the time it took off from Poland and added that there were no engine or flight system failures. There were neither explosion nor any kind of damage in the air before the crash.



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