The crew of Poland’s president’s jet, which crashed in Russia last weekend, knew for a few horrifying moments that they were going to die, according to a story in The New York Times Friday. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/world/europe/16poland.html?ref=world
One of the chief investigators probing the crash that killed 96 people, including President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of Polish dignatories, talked about what has been garnered so far from the plane’s black boxes.
“One could say that the crew was aware of the inevitability of the coming catastrophe, if only due to the plane shaking after the wings hit the trees,” a Polish prosecutor, Andrzej Seremet, said during an interview with a Polish radio station, The Times wrote.
The jet, a Tu-154, crashed in heavy fog Saturday as it defied air traffic controllers’ warnings not to land at a military airport near Smolensk. The plane was taking Kaczynski, his wife and Polish political and military officials to attend a ceremony in Russia commemorating the 70th anniversary of the massacre of 20,000 police officers in Katyn.
There has been speculation that the crew of the president’s plane tried to land, despite the warnings about the weather, so that Polish officials they wouldn’t be late for the ceremony. But Seremet said that the flight recorder shows no indication that that the pilot felt pressured to land.
The Tu-54 jet was 20 years old, and didn’t have a state-of-the-art aerial navigation system. An official told The Times that the pilot may not have known that this jet model loses altitude quicker than expected when it descends at a rate of more than 20 feet a second.