The investigation into the plane crash in western Russia that killed the Polish president was a thorough and transparent probe that drew the correct conclusions, pilots and flight safety experts say.
The Russia-based Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK) laid the blame for the April 2010 crash of the Polish Air Force Tu-154 that was carrying President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others squarely on the Polish side, and politicians in Poland have since lined up to try to pin blame elsewhere.
"It was an extremely good report - they [MAK] are very thorough people," said David Learmount, the safety and operations editor for Flight International magazine and a former flying instructor in Britain's Royal Air Force.
The report, which has been translated into English, sets out the reasons for the crash in minute detail. While it is a complex brief for a layman, the main causes of the crash are clear enough: A flight crew, for whatever reason, pressed on beyond any safe limit with a non-standard approach in visibility so poor they had to rely totally on the cockpit instruments.
The reaction to the report from some Polish politicians has been emotional, and several have denounced it as one-sided or a cover-up.
Interior Minister Jerzy Miller said it was inappropriate of the report to speculate on what Polish Air Force chief Andrzej Blasik was doing onboard and whether his presence might or might not have affected the crew.
The MAK report asserted that Gen. Blasik's presence in the cockpit was a strong contributory factor to the crash and that it "had a psychological impact on the crewmembers and influenced their decision to land in any conditions."
"We were surprised by the mention of Gen. Blasik's name because it is a passenger's name. In cases like that passengers are not subject to the kind of analysis that was conducted and made public by the Russians," Miller said.
Blasik was in the cockpit at the time of the crash, however, despite having no reasonable business being there. (The MAK report describes him as "an unauthorized person in the cockpit.")
"I'm convinced that our [Polish] side is to blame for most causes of the Smolensk disaster," Poland's special envoy to MAK, Edmund Klich, said in an interview with Poland's TVN24 channel. "Any faults on the part of Russia should be ruled out."
Klich said crash was caused by "faults in the pilots' training."
"A good crew of a serviceable plane - and we have no information that the Tu-154 experienced technical problems - just won't perform a landing in that manner. Even if that was what the air traffic control instructed them to do," he said.
Perhaps the single biggest factor in the crash was that the Polish crew was not even flying a recognized instrument approach in coordination with the Russian air traffic controllers. They were using their flight management system to bring them to the airfield - a type of approach allowed at certain airfields, but not at this one, and it was certainly not agreed with air traffic control, says Learmount.
Writing on his blog last week, Learmount said:
"The Smolensk air traffic controllers did all they could to prevent this accident, given that the Polish crew were clearly operating autonomously, conducting their own Flight Management System letdown and not requesting any help.
Several airline pilots who spoke to RIA Novosti broadly agreed with his conclusions.
"There were plenty of opportunities to avoid the holes in the cheese lining up," said Andy Birt, an ex-Royal Navy pilot now flying for a charter airline in Britain. "If the only thing they did was to react accordingly to the terrain warning they would all still be here now."
He notes that there was "a total lack of pre-flight preparation. This was an unfamiliar airfield with a basic approach aid and weather so poor that only a Cat3 Auto-land equipped aircraft and airfield would result in a safe landing."
Birt agrees with Learmount that a lack of crew cooperation, caused by the pilot speaking Russian to air traffic and Polish to the other crew, was a significant factor.
"Only the captain who was flying could speak Russian, which apart from increasing his workload dramatically, meant that the crew was now out of the loop. And there was no brief [before the approach], so how could the crew know what to expect?" Birt says, adding that this meant the copilot could not tell the captain "you must listen, this is not safe."
Another British airline pilot, Alan, who asked for his surname not be disclosed for contractual reasons, says that although the Russian air traffic controllers' actions were not perfect, this did not significantly contribute to the accident.
"The air traffic controller asks the pilot 'have you ever landed at a military airfield?' - a completely irrelevant question," he says. "And the controller should have been more decisive and stated that the airfield was closed due to the weather."
Learmount maintains the controllers are clear of blame, as they could not order a foreign-registered aircraft to land elsewhere, and the Polish pilot had taken the situation into his own hands.
"The controllers couldn't stop him," he says. "Ultimately it was down to the crew."
MOSCOW, January 21(Howard Gethin, RIA Novosti)
