WARSAW – Poland’s air force chief was in the cockpit of the aircraft carrying Polish president Lech Kaczynski and 95 others when it crashed in Russia but there is no sign of direct pressure on pilots to land, the main Polish investigator has said.
Still, his comment may reinforce speculation that the pilots decided to land their Tu-154 military aircraft at Smolensk airport against the advice of air traffic controllers because of pressure from Mr Kaczynski or members of his entourage.
The president’s aircraft was running late for a planned April 10th ceremony in nearby Katyn forest marking the 70th anniversary of the murder of some 22,000 Polish army officers and intellectuals there by the Soviet secret police.
Russian aviation officials investigating the cause of the crash confirmed last week that two non-crew members were in the cockpit just before the crash. Edmund Klich was the first official to identify one of them publicly.
Asked during an interview on Poland’s TVN channel late on Monday who was in the cockpit with the crew at the time of the crash, Mr Klich said: “It was Gen [Andrzej] Blasik ... He may have wanted to get a sense of the situation.
“There is no sentence [in the black box recordings] indicating direct pressure on the crew to land such as, ‘We really need to land’. Of course, you can also mount pressure by the sole fact of being there.”
Psychologists were studying the recordings, he added.
Mr Kaczynski, a combative nationalist who was very keen to attend the Katyn commemoration, is known to have tried in vain to persuade his pilot in 2008 to ignore nearby gunfire and to land in Georgia during that country’s brief war with Russia.
Mr Klich, head of a Polish committee that analyses aircraft crashes, is also taking part in the official Russian investigation. He said the crew would have been aware just a few seconds before the crash that they were doomed. – (Reuters)