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This is the story of the Smolensk Air disaster, the disaster where the polish presidential airplane crashed while attempting to land at Smolensk, a town in russia. Before we start, This video is based on the russian report, there's a polish report they differ slightly. If you want me to take a look at that do let me know in the comments below.
On the 10th of april 2010, A TU154 was flying from warsaw poland to smolensk in russia with the president of poland Lech Kaczyński, he was flying with his wife, high ranking members of the polish military and polish citizens who were travelling to smolensk to take part in a memorial. This trip was special and it was the culmination of weeks of back and forth between the two countries to sort out the logistics of this mission. When the president of any country travels it is a big deal. Smolensk airport was not an international airport and so was not up to ICAO standards, the controllers there didn't even speak english so all ATC transmissions were to be made in russian.
In the days leading up to the flight, plane after plane landed at the small smolensk airport carrying members of the polish delegation and finally by the 10th of april everything was ready for the president's arrival. The plane was to take off at 8 am local time but the plane took off at 9:27 am after being delayed. The plane cruised at 33,000 feet until it was under the control of minsk ATC, and they allowed the plane to descend down to 12000 feet. Minsk center had some bad news though. The visibility at Smolensk was bad it was at 400m or 1300 feet.
They checked in with their colleagues, A yak 40 had taken off before them carrying some members of the polish delegation. The Yak 40 landed at around 9 am and they said that as they landed visibility halved from 4km or 13,000 feet to 2 km or 6500 feet. In addition to that an IL76 made two approaches to the airport and then opted to divert because the weather was just so bad. At 9:40 the visibility was measured to be 800 meters or 2600 feet and the cloud base was at 262 feet, well below the minimums for the NDB approach onto runway 26.
By 10:23 am the plane was in contact with the tower at smolensk. Smolensk tower checked with the crew about the fuel that was remaining and then told them that they could divert to either minsk or vitebsk. But despite the bad weather, the crew wanted to make a “trial approach” to see if they could make it. The controller cleared them to try, but the controller warned them to not go below 328 feet and told them to expect to go around when they hit 328 feet. The presidential TU154 flew the pattern they checked in with the crew of the Yak that had landed earlier, to get an idea of what lay ahead of them. The crew of the yak told them that it was bad, very bad. The pilots turned onto the final approach as they cut through the thick fog that enveloped smolensk. Suddenly the plane strikes a tree 3600 feet short of the runway they were too low and in deep trouble. The runway is at an elevation of 258 meters and the tree that they hit was at 233 meters, they were essentially below the elevation of the runway. 800 feet from the initial impact point, the left wing hit a tree , the damaged plane now started to bank to the left and before long the plane was inverted and it hit the ground. None of the plane's 96 occupants survived.
With every air crash, there an immense amount of pressure to figure out what happened, family members want answers, everyone wants answers but with this accident, the pressure to find out what went wrong was on another level.
