Looks like pilot error and weather in the Polish crash

Among the dead
President and his wife
Head of Central bank
Head of Army
Had of Navy
Head of Intelligence
Dep Foreign Minister and many others
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Russian media reports said the pilots ignored advice from air traffic control to divert to another airport but the pilot went ahead to Smolensk.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8612825.stm

Why didn't the pilot listen to the experts on the ground and divert?

Why were they on a 29 year old aircraft?

Within 200 ft of the ground without visibility; that's not a great decision. But I'll bet the pilot had done the same thing 1000 times before. Looks like he couldn't even see the tree tops.

The pilot made a grave error - no doubt under pressure from all the powerful on board.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/europe/11poland.html?hp
<snip>
Officials in Poland have repeatedly requested that the government’s aging air fleet be replaced.

Former Prime Minister Leszek Miller, who survived a helicopter crash in 2003, told Polish news he had long predicted such a disaster. “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,” he said.

A press secretary for Mr. Antufiyev, the governor of Smolensk, said the landing took place under very bad visibility, and Russian air traffic controllers advised the crew to land in Minsk, but the crew decided to land anyway. The Polish news channel TVN24 reported that moments before the crash, air traffic controllers had refused a Russian military aircraft permission to land, but that they could not refuse permission to the Polish plane.

Most ILS approaches have minimums equal to or greater than 200' ceilings and 1/2 mile of visibility. Fog would have likely created conditions much less than that. I suspect the airport probably did not have an ILS and more likely had a nonprecision instrument approach, which means much higher minimums. Reportedly the flight crashed on it's 4th attempt at landing, which means almost certainly the conditions were very bad and they should have went somewhere else. Personally I will never fly an instrument approach more than twice before I go somewhere else and I'm seriously going to consider doing so even after one attempt. However, it's possible that they didn't have the fuel to divert.

has to be an unbelievable bad day in Poland right now.

for sure

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/europe/11poland.html?hp
<snip>

Officials in Poland have repeatedly requested that the government’s aging air fleet be replaced.

Former Prime Minister Leszek Miller, who survived a helicopter crash in 2003, told Polish news he had long predicted such a disaster. “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,” he said.

A press secretary for Mr. Antufiyev, the governor of Smolensk, said the landing took place under very bad visibility, and Russian air traffic controllers advised the crew to land in Minsk, but the crew decided to land anyway. The Polish news channel TVN24 reported that moments before the crash, air traffic controllers had refused a Russian military aircraft permission to land, but that they could not refuse permission to the Polish plane.

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