Compare April's news to this: Kaczynski’s Pilot Reportedly Felt Pressure to Land Doomed Jet
• July 14, 2010, 1:05 PM ET
By Marcin Sobczyk
Questions continue to swirl about the circumstances that led to the April crash of Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s jet that killed Mr. Kaczynski and 95 others. Broadcaster TVN24, a respected Polish news station, is reporting that Polish authorities have managed to decipher more of the cockpit conversation captured by the plane’s voice recorder. What they found appears to indicate significant pressure on the pilot to land the plane, bound for a memorial ceremony in Russia, despite heavy fog and extremely limited visibility.
“If I don’t land, they’ll kill me,” or “If we don’t land, he’ll kill me,” the pilot said at one point, several minutes before the plane crashed while attempting to land at a military airport in Smolensk in western Russia on April 10, TVN24 reported Wednesday. A transcript of discussions among crew members and others in the cockpit prepared by Russian investigators and released in June had said that portion of the recording was impossible to understand because of background noise.
There has been no official confirmation of the TVN24 report, with prosecutors on the case declining to comment.
Mr. Kaczynski, often ridiculed by his political opponents and unpopular with much of the public as he neared the end of his presidential term, came to be seen in a far more positive light after his untimely death and his burial as a national hero. But the protective aura that has surrounded his memory in recent months seems to be fading as his demise is seized on by his allies — from his Law and Justice party — and their opponents — in Civic Platform — alike for political ends.
The Civic Platform camp — whose candidate Bronislaw Komorowski earlier this month won the presidential election called to fill Mr. Kaczynski’s post — has become increasingly vocal in alleging that Mr. Kaczynski himself may have played a contributing role in the crash, which also killed dozens of Polish lawmakers and senior officials. One Civic Platform member of parliament has gone so far as to say publicly that Mr. Kaczynski may have been drunk the morning of the crash.
The president was determined to appear at Katyn that morning for a commemoration of more than 20,000 Polish soldiers killed there on Stalin’s orders during World War II. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Civic Platform, Mr. Kaczynski’s main political rival, stole the show from him three days earlier by appearing at a similar event organized by the Russian government, with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in attendance.
The right-leaning Law and Justice party and its allies — who have opposed Mr. Tusk’s appeasement with Moscow — for their part are focusing on irregularities on the Russian side, playing down the role of the president and the pilots, and questioning Mr. Tusk’s decision to leave much of the investigation in Russian hands.
According to the Polish daily Dziennik, Polish investigators have asked the U.S. Justice Department whether it is technologically possible for the fog that led to the crash to have been man-made. The newspaper said the request was made so that the government could rule out conspiracy theories advanced by some that Russia manipulated the weather to bring down the plane.
Poland’s legendary dissident and former president Lech Walesa, who now openly backs the current Tusk government, recently wrote on his blog that he believed the late president, Mr. Kaczynski, was the main reason behind the crash. Any confirmed statements that show pilots under pressure to land lend credence to the governing camp’s views and will be fought passionately by Kaczynski loyalists on the right.
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