Disaster for Poland

Mave

Mave

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SMOLENSK, Russia - Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country's highest military and civilian leaders died on Saturday when the presidential plane crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog in western Russia, killing 97, officials said.

Russian and Polish officials said there were no survivors on the 26-year-old Tupolev, which was taking the president, his wife and staff to events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre in Katyn forest of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police.

The crash devastated the upper echelons of Poland's political and military establishments. On board were the army chief of staff, the navy chief commander, and heads of the air and land forces. Also killed were the national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, Olympic Committee head, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish foreign ministry said.


Russia's Emergency Minister Sergei Shoigu said there were 97 dead. His ministry said 88 of whom were part of the Polish state delegation. Poland's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Piotr Paszkowski, said there were 89 people on the passenger list but one person had not shown up for the roughly 1 1/2-hour flight from Warsaw's main airport.

Some of the people on board were relatives of those slain in the Katyn massacre. Also among the victims was Anna Walentynowicz, whose firing in August 1980 from the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk sparked a workers' strike that spurred the eventual creation of the Solidarity freedom movement. She went on to be a prominent member.

"This is a great tragedy, a great shock to us all," former president and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said.


U.S. President Barack Obama said the loss "is devastating to Poland, to the United States, and to the world."
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In a statement, Obama said: "President Kaczynski was a distinguished statesman who played a key role in the Solidarity movement, and he was widely admired in the United States as a leader dedicated to advancing freedom and human dignity. With him were many of Poland's most distinguished civilian and military leaders who have helped to shape Poland's inspiring democratic transformation. We join all the people of Poland in mourning their passing."

The deaths were not expected to directly affect the functioning of Polish government: Poland's president is commander in chief of its armed forces but the position's domestic duties are chiefly symbolic. Most top government ministers were not aboard the plane.
Aging planes?

Shoigu said investigators had recovered the plane's flight data recorders and were examining them.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154s in the past four decades, including six in the past five years. The Russian carrier Aeroflot recently withdrew its Tu-154 fleet from service, largely because the planes do not meet international noise restrictions and use too much fuel.

The aircraft was the workhorse of East Bloc civil aviation in the 1970s and 1980s, and many of the crashes have been attributed to the chaos that ensued after the breakup of the Soviet Union

Poland has long discussed replacing the planes that carry the country's leaders but said they lacked the funds.
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Although initial signs pointed to an accident with no indication of foul play, the death of a Polish president and much of the Polish state and defense establishment in Russia en route to commemorating one of the saddest events in Poland's long, complicated history with Russia, was laden with tragic irony.

Reflecting the grave sensibilities of the crash to relations between the two countries, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin personally assumed charge of the investigation. He landed in Smolensk Saturday with an entourage of Russian officials to meet Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who was flying in from Warsaw. The president's twin brother, former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kacynski, also flew there in a chartered plane, according to his party.

"This is unbelievable — this tragic, cursed Katyn," Kaczynski's predecessor, Aleksander Kwasniewski, said on TVN24 television.

It is "a cursed place, horrible symbolism," he said. "It's hard to believe. You get chills down your spine."

Pilot ignored instructions
Andrei Yevseyenkov, spokesman for the Smolensk regional government, said Russian dispatchers asked the crew to divert from the military airport in North Smolensk and land instead in Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus, or in Moscow because of the fog.

While traffic controllers generally have the final word in whether it is safe for a plane to land, they can and do leave it to the pilots' discretion.

Air Force Gen. Alexander Alyoshin confirmed that the pilot disregarded instructions to fly to another airfield.

"But they continued landing, and it ended, unfortunately, with a tragedy," the Interfax news agency quoted Alyoshin as saying. He added that the pilot makes the final decision about whether to land.
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Source : http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36352097/ns/world_news-europe/
 
I heard early the morning when the initial reports came. They stated that maybe a plane in Russia has crashed which maybe carries the state elite of Poland. But that's seriously sad news as Kaczynski really was a good man and an amazing president. His statements and philosophy relied on grounds of history, yet he managed to adopt to the modern day. We can all remember him from the epic speech the presidents together held in Georgia, Gori or Tbilisi, I'm unsure, about the Georgian war in 2008. Estonian president has sent out a long thoughtful letter with his condolences to Poland. The speech is seriously good.
 
"Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here" fix that Mave, bad copy/paste D:



Really sad news for Poland, rest in peace all who died.
 
R.I.P

But why were they on a 26 year old russian plane? They should use newer planes to transport the maximum authority of a country.
 
ThePro said:
R.I.P

But why were they on a 26 year old russian plane? They should use newer planes to transport the maximum authority of a country.
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Every commercial airflight you have is most likely with a plane that is 15-20 years old. This except for the Airbus planes anyways for now. But the Polish government was going to upgrade their planes a year ago, but the opposition said it is wasting peoples' money and bad decision during recession so the in-charge guys declined the plane renewal.

I think everyone needs to be retold that they didn't crash due to the plane's technical fault. It was thick fog and they didn't manage landing to the crappy airport like that.

As a side note about the Tu-154 is that most of the crashes thorough the history aren't the plane's technical fault. It has been Russians either putting too much cargo in it (exceeding weight limit), transporting flammable cargo and one has even been shot down in now-Belarussian airzone by them.
 
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