Lech Kaczynski's Body Lies In State, Vladimir Putin Steps In

Putin Takes Charge Of Probe Into Kaczynski's Crash


Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has visited the crash site where Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s plane plunged to the ground.

Putin was joined at the disaster zone near Smolensk in western Russia by his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk. Kaczynski’s twin brother Jaroslaw has also been at the scene.

Putin has promised to take personal responsibility for the investigation into the causes of the tragedy.

The black box flight recorder has already been recovered. A key question that needs answering is why the pilot attempted to land in thick fog in an aeroplane that was not equipped for such a manoeuvre.

Russian air traffic control has said the pilot ignored repeated instructions to divert to another airport. The plane is believed to have hit trees on the third attempt to land.

In similar poor weather conditions two years ago in Georgia, President Kaczynski himself instructed his pilot to land the plane, overruling danger warnings from Georgian air traffic control.


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Sources: Euronews, Russia Today, Youtube, Google Maps

Lech Kaczynski's Death A Conspiracy Or Mere Accident? The Black Box

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Shock, Suspicion Spread After Polish Leader's Death


Poland has declared a week of national mourning after a plane crash Saturday killed 96 people, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski and the first lady, as well as dozens of Poland's senior military, political and religious leaders. While many Poles are still in a state of shock, they're also asking questions about the government's fleet of aging aircraft.

Late into the evening Saturday night and Sunday, thousands of Poles continued to walk through the square in front of the president's residence. They lay bouquets of flowers, lit candles or just stood quietly, staring at the Polish flag fluttering at half-staff above the presidential palace.

The loss is devastating to Poland; in addition to the president and first lady, the rest of the dead include the head of the Polish central bank, the deputy foreign minister, the national security adviser; the deputy parliament speaker and several members of parliament, including two presidential candidates.

The military faced equally horrific loses: the heads of the Polish navy, air force, special forces, ground forces and the army chief of staff were all killed.

Slawka Spurek says she was stunned when she heard. Spurek is visiting Warsaw from a nearby town for the weekend, and was enjoying a museum with her family when a guard told her the news.

"The lady said, 'Have you heard our president is dead?' — and it was a shock. We still can't believe it. There are so many people under the presidential palace here in Warsaw, and so many candles," Spurek says. "There's an endless river of people, and I can't believe this."

President Kaczynski and the other VIPs were traveling to western Russia when their plane crashed in heavy fog while trying to land at an airport in Smolensk. TV footage showed the smoldering, twisted wreckage of the Polish presidential jet, a Russian-made Tupolev-154, spread across a wooded area more than a mile from the airport.

Warsaw resident Alex Martin calls it Poland's biggest tragedy in its post-World War II history. "[We're] left without any commanders of the army and the president of the national bank, so it was really disaster for the country and the people."



The parliament speaker is now acting president, and the country will hold presidential elections sometime in June.

The pain of the loss is compounded by the fact that the president and his entourage were on their way to remember the 70th anniversary of a massacre in the forests of Katyn of thousands of Polish military officers and Polish intelligentsia by the Soviet secret police during World War II.

Poles are now calling the plane crash the "second Katyn," and refer to the forests around the Russian town as "cursed," "haunted" and "damned."

There are already conspiracy theories circulating.

One man standing in front of the presidential palace held a sign that said "the inhuman murderers have done it again," referring to Russia.

But investigators so far believe the accident was most likely the result of pilot error. Russian media report that the Polish pilot was warned several times by air traffic controllers to divert to another airport because of the dangerous fog conditions. Professor Wawrzyniec Konarski with the Warsaw School of Social Sciences says that despite the grief and sadness, Poles are asking tough questions.

"It has to be clarified why the plane, the staff, decided to land despite the fact that the fog was so strong," says Konarski. "If it was really true that the airport warned them or not, to what extent were they aware that it was so dangerous to land the plane? All of those things have to be clarified to avoid any further conspiracy theories."

Poles are also asking why so many VIPs were on one aircraft, and why the Polish government had not upgraded its fleet of aging aircraft.

President Kaczynski had been one of the leaders of the pro-democracy Solidarity movement that helped Poland overthrow the communist regime. His friend Lech Walesa, the dissident who went on to become president, said simply of the crash, "the elite of our country has perished."

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Poland's Deadly Decision


A plane carrying President Lech Kaczynski crashed in Russia Saturday, killing him, his wife, and many top officials. Aviation expert Clive Irving on why they never should have been on that aircraft.

What were they thinking? Poland is in deep mourning for its president and many of the country’s political and cultural elite who died Saturday in the crash of a Soviet-era jet, the Tu-154, on approach to Smolensk in western Russia.

It’s astonishing that they were flying in a plane as old as a Tupolev-154. In the airline food chain, the Tu-154 is more likely to be found in Africa flying for a non-regulated and nameless carrier on arms-running or drug missions.

In 2003, the then-Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller was lucky to survive crashing in an even older Soviet design, the Mi-8 helicopter that he was using. Today, Miller told the Polish media, “I once said that we will one day meet in a funeral procession, and that is when we will take the decision to replace the aircraft fleet.”

Inescapably, Saturday’s national tragedy is invested with the dark and still traumatic memories of the event that caused President Lech Kaczynski to be flying into Russia, the massacre 70 years ago of 20,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest. This deliberate atrocity was ordered by Stalin, but for decades the Soviets claimed that it had been carried out by the Nazis. The Polish presidential entourage’s visit was part of a renewed attempt by Russia and Poland to reconcile both nations to the truth and move on.

Katyn, said former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, “is a damned place. It sends shivers down my spine.”

And now, just as Katyn decapitated Poland’s military elite, the crash has decapitated its contemporary leadership in many fields. As the country's most famous former president, Lech Walesa, put it: “They wanted to cut off our head there [at Katyn], and here the flower of our nation has perished.”

Why does it seem so reckless to assign an obsolete airplane to such a prominent mission? The age of the airframe itself is not the problem. The Tupolev is a 1972 design and, as many Russian airplanes of the day were, it is a copy of an American model, the Boeing 727 which, for many decades, was the workhorse of U.S. domestic routes until it was replaced by the Boeing 757 and other new generations of airliners like the Airbus A320.

In those days, Russian airliners were built to be tough and rugged to fly to distant provinces of the Soviet Union in often appalling weather where the airports were often basic and without sophisticated navigation aids. (I remember landing at Moscow in a 154 in the middle of a blizzard and hitting the tarmac with a huge thump. Later the pilot told us that that was standard technique to get a grip on the snow. It didn’t help to see the burned out carcass of a less lucky airliner still lying beyond the end of the runway.) And to that extent the 154, a hands-on plane for skilled pilots, had a good safety record. Only 28 have been lost of the 1,000 or so built in 40 years of service—given the world accident rates over that period, a respectable record.

Aeroflot, the Russian carrier, finally retired its 154s this year, by which time they truly qualified as old bangers. The most pressing reason to dump them for Aeroflot was not simply safety but fuel costs. The 154’s engines were gas guzzlers, noisy and dirty, another sign of how far behind in technology the plane had become. Aeroflot now flies Boeings and Airbuses.

Of course, it is far too soon to judge what caused the crash today in Smolensk. But the circumstances have all the characteristics of the kind of accident that has been virtually eliminated where current aviation technology exists—an approach in thick fog, a plane lacking contemporary avionics to give the pilots an absolutely flawless glide path to touch down in zero visibility, and an airport without the ground equipment that matches those avionics.

The pilots, no matter how skilled, would have been in a situation that no pilot ever wants to be in these days: controlling the approach manually with the engine throttles, flying on instruments all the way until they touched the tarmac. In other words, it’s a very last-century kind of crash.

BBC News reports that Russian media are claiming that the pilots were advised to divert to another airport but chose to persist with the approach to Smolensk. The 154 was being flown by the Polish air force. There are also reports that this same airplane had developed problems during a 2008 flight to Mongolia by President Kaczynski.

Western nations, as a rule, take care that their leaders and VIPs fly either state-of-the-art military transports or commercial airliners of the same standard. The U.S. is the only nation that provides its president with an airplane as sophisticated as the Boeing 747s that operate as Air Force One and Two.

The last time any U.S. official died on a political mission was in April 1996 when Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was killed—along with many of his department’s top people and U.S. business leaders—in Croatia. Their CT-43, the military version of the Boeing 737, crashed into a mountainside on approach to Dubrovnik. The Air Force blamed the pilots for faulty navigation.

President Lech Kaczynski and all the other more than 80 VIPs who boarded the 154 were in a needless risk situation. Given the weather conditions, they should never have been cleared to fly in such an airplane.


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Sources: MSNBC, NPR, Russia Today, The Daily Beast, Youtube, Google Maps

Air France Tragedy: Brazilian Prince Dead! What Happened On Board Flight 447? Pilots Overwhelmed, Error Messages....Why?

(MSNBC reports on the Air France, Flight 447 tragedy. Some bodies have been found.)

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Telegraph.co.uk----

Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris began as an ordinary flight across the Atlantic, carrying passengers from 32 nations. But it ended in disaster.

Just 24 hours after celebrating their marriage with an extravagant Balinese-themed reception for 300 guests, Bianca Cotta and Carlos Eduardo de Melo set off for honeymoon in France at the start of a new life together.

The attractive couple from prominent Brazilian families, already rising stars in the legal and medical fields, had every reason to believe a wonderful future awaited them as they boarded Air France flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on the evening of Sunday, May 31.

Mr de Melo, 33, was a lawyer and Miss Cotta, the only child of one of the country's top engineering professors, was a dermatologist who last year graduated top of her class at medical school.

But by the time reports and pictures of their "fairytale" wedding made the society pages the following morning, the newly-weds were presumed dead, along with the other 214 passengers and 12 crew on board the doomed Airbus 330.

"The party was beautiful," said Cris Castelo, the wedding organiser and friend of the bride. "Despite the tragedy, at least they had one day with the people that they most loved in life. May they now rest in peace."

There was no hint of anything out of the ordinary as the plane took off at 7.30pm and rose into the already dark skies, leaving behind Rio's world-famous beaches and Sugar Loaf Mountain with its towering white statue of Christ, arms spread wide.

On board was a cross-section of humanity, more than half from Brazil and France but from 30 other nations as well - five Britons and three Irish among them. The passengers included a Brazilian prince, an 11-year-old boy returning to boarding school in England, a renowned conductor en route to a concert in Ukraine, European holidaymakers, students, academics and business executives, including the head of Michelin South America. A group of French salesmen had won a trip to Brazil for their performance, and a German was making a whistle-stop trip home to collect documents he needed to marry the Brazilian woman he had recently fallen in love with.

For about three hours the plane, under the command of Capt Marc Dubois, 58 - one of Air France's most experienced pilots with 11,000 flying hours under his belt, including 1,700 on this type of Airbus - flew north-east along the coast of Brazil.

The passengers ate their evening meals, selected from French wines to wash the food down, and then flicked between the in-flight movies - a past and present selection from the Cannes Film Festival - in the seat-back video or dozed off as the 11-hour overnight flight proceeded uneventfully.

The plane headed out into the Atlantic and one of three pilots sent the final sign-off from Brazilian air space at 22.33 after leaving behind the tropical archipelago of Fernando de Noronha. In the cockpit, Capt Dubois, married with two adult children, may have been talking about his latest home renovation plans. He was due to retire soon but told friends he loved the job so much, "I could work until I'm 70".

It is not known whether he or one of his two co-pilots was at the controls when they sent a message that they had encountered heavy electrically-charged tropical storms at 11pm. Nor is it known whether they discussed taking a detour to try to skirt the violent combination of lightning, ice, winds and updrafts of up to 100mph in the thunderclouds that spin up from the churning ocean waters to heights of 50,000 ft.

Such storms are common across the equator, in an area known by meteorologists as the "intertropical convergence zone", and the planes are built to survive them. But pilots will often fly far out of their way to avoid them, if only for the comfort of their passengers.

The towering clouds show up on radar and that night a Lufthansa crew in the area at a similar time steered through the turbulent skies while an Iberia pilot took a 30-mile detour to avoid turbulence and storms.

Flight AF447, however, ploughed into the middle of the buffeting winds, lightning and ice of the storm. Nervous flyers were doubtless already alarmed while even their more sanguine peers were probably preparing to tell stories about some of the worst turbulence they had encountered.

But beginning 10 minutes later, at 11.10pm, when the autopilot was disengaged, a barrage of 24 automated messages sent back from the plane's computer system to Air France headquarters charted the catastrophic failures of computer and electrical systems during its final desperate four minutes.

Faced by this onslaught of malfunctions, the three men in the cockpit frantically battled to keep control of their craft. It was a struggle they rapidly lost.

Finally at 11.14pm, with the pilots overwhelmed by the cascade of calamities, came the signal of complete electrical failure and "vertical speed" alert as all cabin pressure was lost – a strong indication for investigators that the plane split apart before spiralling down 35,000 feet in pieces through the storm. A report filed by a Spanish airline captain flying in the same area at the time said that he and his co-pilot saw a bright flash of white in the distance plunge into the ocean, although no connection has been proved.

Still the subject of conjecture is the cause of this disastrous chain of events, although the first strong clue came in a memo issued by Airbus on Thursday night to all airlines operating its 330 model.

It reminded pilots of the need to maintain appropriate speeds and angles for the plane when flying in adverse weather - too slow and the plane will stall; too fast and it could break up. For, according to leaks from the investigation, flight 447 was flying too slow for the conditions.

And the automated messages have revealed that all three external air speed sensors were giving different readings for the plane's velocity, diverging by up to 35 miles per hour – leaving pilots and on-board computer confused over what information to follow.

In previous crash investigations, it has emerged that sensors iced up in severe weather, despite being electrically heated. And moisture sucked up from the ocean by the 100pmh updrafts would have turned to heavy ice by the time it reached the plane's altitude.

French investigators also said on Saturday that Airbus had recommended last year that airlines flying the A330 should replace the sensors but that Air France had not changed the instruments, known as Pito tubes, on the plane that crashed. The day before, the airline said it had begun to replace Pitot tubes on its Airbus fleet.

But Paul-Louis Arslanian, the chief investigator, warned against "jumping to conclusions", saying that the sensors had not been shown to be at fault for the disaster and planes could fly safely with the old systems.

What can also only be conjecture is the terror that the passengers and crew must have felt during those final four minutes of the flight. But as the lights flared and failed, alarms sounded and the plane pitched and weaved horrendously, it can only have been horrific.

Some would have screamed in panic; other clutched hands with friends, lovers, even strangers, in mute shock and fear.

The 300 passengers on board a Qantas Airbus 330 whose flight computer put the plane into an unprovoked 650-ft dive last October can vouch for the terror of such an incident. More than 100 of the 300 on board were injured, some seriously, as passengers not wearing were seatbelts were sent hurtling around the cabin before the pilots overrode the computer and regained control.

Investigators probing last week's tragedy will also be studying whether there are any similarities with the Qantas Airbus malfunction, when the flight-control computer followed faulty information about the plane's wing angles, and ignored accurate data. It was the fourth, and most serious, such problem to occur on an Airbus 330.

The air forces of three countries last week scoured the churning equatorial waters of the mid-Atlantic, at first in the faint hope of finding survivors and later seeking bodies or any sign of wreckage. Naval vessels are also arriving in the search zone.

Nine Brazilian aircraft, including three Hercules, a US Navy Orion P-3 maritime patrol plane and French Falcon 50 flew out of the military air base in Natal, in Brazil's far north-east, leaving at 3am each morning to reach the main search area by daybreak.

For the airmen who returned in the sultry heat of the afternoon, the first few days of overhead sweeps were frustrating. "Water, just water, that's all we saw," said a Brazilian crewman after his Hercules landed on Friday.

Circling just 1,000 ft above the churning equatorial waters, the crews struggled to pick out debris from white-crested waves and tricks of the light as glaring sunlight and thick storm clouds alternated overhead.

The salvage operation took a serious blow on Thursday, two days after Brazilian defence minister Nelson Jobim confidently asserted that his country's search planes had spotted a debris field and an oil slick from the lost plane.

A Brazilian Lynx helicopter picked up the first piece of suspected AF 447 wreckage, a wooden cargo pallet, only to establish that the plane had carried no such items.

But on Saturday evening there appeared to be a breakthrough when the Brazilian air force announced that the first two bodies from the downed plane had been recovered, along with a seat and luggage. Details including a serial number from the seat and an Air France ticket claimed to have been found inside a leather case were being passed to Air France in Paris for confirmation that they came from the lost plane.

Yet as important as retrieving material from the surface will be for working out what went so catastrophically wrong that night, the key breakthrough would be to recover the black box and cockpit voice recorder from the bottom of the Atlantic.

The devices emit signals that can be picked up for 30 days, but to find them through 23,000 ft deep water on an ocean bed of underwater mountains and ravines is the sub-aqua equivalent of seeking a needle in a haystack.

Without black box or voice recorder, investigators may be never be able to explain why the pilots and plane were so dramatically overwhelmed.

For family and friends of Bianca Cotta and Carlos Eduardo de Melo, the only consolation may be to learn why the young couple whose marriage they had celebrated so joyously was snatched away from them just a day later.

There should have another new bride called Bianca on that flight. But as Bianca Igregas and Rodrigo Motta danced at their wedding reception in a hotel on Copacabana beach in the early hours of Sunday, they decided to postpone their departure by a day.

"The party was such fun and we were talking about the next day and what a rush we'd be in," Mrs Igregas told The Sunday Telegraph. "We knew we would not be able to relax and enjoy the next day so we decided impulsively not to fly."

That change of plans saved their lives as they too were booked to fly on AF 447. Instead, they flew on the same route on Monday.

Miss Igregas, 29, a lawyer, and Mr Motta, 32, who helps run the family car dealership, spoke to The Sunday Telegraph about their relief and sadness from Moscow, where they are now on honeymoon.

"We were in shock," Mr Motta said of the moment they heard of the missing plane. "We started crying and hugging each other."

Miss Igregas said that they were now "celebrating life, enjoying each moment. Such tragedies make you realise how you should live each moment of life intensely."

She added: "We thank God for giving us the chance of a life together. We were so moved by the story of the other Bianca, because that could have been our story."


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Sources: Telegraph.co.uk, Huffington Post, BBC, Wikipedia, Google Maps