• By
  • Marcin Sobczyk

The transcript of cockpit conversations in the Polish presidential aircraft that crashed in April shows a crew confident they could land despite extremely limited visibility and an official saying President Lech Kaczynski was consulted about the flight that would eventually kill him.

Pilots ignored repeated warnings from automated systems that instructed them to regain altitude. They seem to have realized the situation only after they hit trees while making an approach to the Smolensk airport in western Russia.

“It’s going to be a nightmare. We won’t see anything,” an unidentified crew member said at one point when the plane was still at a high altitude. But there was no immediate reaction from other crew members, with a pilot saying several minutes later, as the fog was thickening, that things would probably be just fine.

“Well no, you can see the ground, you can see something. Maybe there won’t be a tragedy,” he said.

But the airport where the plane was trying to land didn’t have the instrument landing system that would have allowed the crew to know exactly where it was despite the fog. Forced to make the so-called nonprecision approach, the crew knew exactly what altitude it was at, but didn’t seem to know that it was a kilometer short of the runway.

The pilots were also completely aware that the fog was extreme, having heard it from fellow pilots of a military jet that had landed in Smolensk before them. In very frank comments that at times turned coarse, the Polish officers on the ground told the presidential pilots it had made it at the very last moment and landing was impossible.

That said, the crew on the ground told the presidential pilot he might just as well try.

The transcript shows officials asked the crew if landing was at all possible. Fifteen minutes before the crash, Mariusz Kazana, head of the foreign ministry’s diplomatic protocol department, entered the cockpit to learn from the captain that landing would likely be impossible.

“We have a problem then,” he said. Four minutes later he told the crew that “there’s no decision yet from the president about what to do next.”

In the final minute of the flight, the crew ignored all the “terrain ahead” and “pull up” warnings from the terrain proximity system, continuing descent. When the airplane hit trees, the crew seemed like it only then realized that things were going tragically bad.

The transcript ends with a repeated curse in Polish as the airplane, without part of its left wing, turned and hit the ground on its back, killing everyone aboard.