The crew of the airliner that crashed killing Poland’s president and dozens of senior officials knew for three to five seconds they would go down, Polish investigators said on Thursday after examining the two black boxes from the plane.Zbigniew Rzepa, a military prosecutor, told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, that the final seconds of the cockpit recordings were “dramatic”.
The black boxes in Moscow, and a third Polish-built one taken to Warsaw on Thursday, may shed light on the cause of the crash that killed 96 people when the pilot of the Russian-built aeroplane tried to land in Smolensk in dense fog. Photographs show trees with their tops sheared off, a testament to the plane’s final, too low, approach.
Russian air controllers say they suggested the Polish aeroplane divert to a safer airport, but that their advice was not followed. Russia’s Interfax news agency, quoting a source close to the investigation, blamed pilot error.
Finding the cause of the crash that killed Lech Kaczynski, Poland’s president, his wife Maria and dozens of their country’s elite, has political overtones.
Russia has displayed unprecedented support and solidarity towards Poland with which it shares a centuries’ old history of tortured relations. The president was flying to a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre of about 4,000 Polish officers by Soviet secret police at that site.
Warsaw again stopped as coffins returned home from Moscow. Outside the palace, thousands of people continued to queue to pay their respects to the president as his body lay in state. The sense of national unity triggered by the disaster has been broken by a controversy over where the first couple should be buried.
At the request of the family, the Kaczynskis are to be buried on Sunday in royal tombs in Krakow. The decision has forced an assessment of Kaczynski’s presidency, and whether it merited his interment in such august company. He had the support of less than a quarter of the electorate
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