Warsaw (Poland): Poland has published cockpit conversations of the final minutes before the April plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski, revealing that pilots decided to land in heavy fog despite warnings from air traffic controllers about poor visibility.
A transcript of the last 39 minutes of the flight also shows that a Foreign Ministry official, Mariusz Kazana, entered the cockpit and made remarks indicating that the president was involved in deciding whether or not to make the difficult landing.
There have been suspicions in Poland that Kaczynski might have pressured the pilot and co-pilot to risk a dangerous landing to keep from being late to a memorial ceremony for Poles massacred by the Soviet Union 70 years ago.
The black boxes, which contain some indecipherable information, do not settle that matter definitively, but they do suggest that the pilots might have been distracted by the presence in the cockpit of non-crew members.
According to the transcript published on Tuesday, the dangers became clear about 25 minutes before landing, when an air traffic official told the Polish crew: "The conditions for landing do not exist."
Later, Kazana, the chief of diplomatic protocol, entered the cockpit and Capt Arkadiusz Protasiuk told him: "Sir, the fog is increasing. At the moment, under these conditions that we have now, we will not manage to land."
Kazana is quoted as answering: "Well, then we have a problem."
"We can hover around for half an hour and then fly off to a backup" airport, the captain replies, later naming Minsk and Vitebsk, two cities in Belarus, as backup options. The crew was also told by the Russian control tower that a Russian Ilyushin plane had abandoned two landing attempts and had flown to another airport.
It's not clear if Kazana left the cockpit and then returned, but a few minutes later he says: "There isn't a decision from the president yet about what to do next."
Polish and Russian investigators have not yet drawn final conclusions about what caused the crash that killed Kaczynski and 95 others, many of them top civilian and military leaders, but evidence has so far pointed to pilot error and bad weather conditions, and the black box recordings seem to further support that theory.
The government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk was eager to publish the report in order to quell suspicions about the cause of the crash and conspiracy theories that have surfaced in the tabloids. Some Polish tabloids have suggested that Russia has something to hide, even though Polish officials have repeatedly praised how Russians have responded and helped investigate the tragedy.
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