As April is nearing, the topic of Smoleńsk air disaster in 2010 reactivates in Poland 🇵🇱
A year after the crash it was 100% clear that the plane shouldn't even have left Warsaw by law, and certainly shouldn't have attempted landing in dense fog.
It was entirely avoidable, caused by a sequence of risky misjudgements and classified as "controlled flight into terrain".
Report (scroll to bottom for English)
Smoleńsk was a logical consequence of that risky culture in the highest Polish command. Initially, both opposing parties (PO and PiS) were so shocked that they basically cooperated in the investigation to find out what happened.
And when they found out, the hell unleashed, because PiS couldn't just accept that their general and staff basically flew their President into the ground.
What happened next largely resembled Russian investigation into the #MH17 crash.
PiS simply rejected three official reports and started a classic Gish gallop, spinning not a single but dozens of half-baked conspiracy theories, and at all the time completely ignoring the primary and fundamental questions: why did the crew simply fly into the ground while talking and ignoring TAWS warnings?
All alternative theories simply pretended none of this ever happened - the plane was lured into an artificial fog, blown up etc etc, as if the cabin recordings never existed.
A number of my relatives are believers in "Smoleńsk assassination", and just over the last few days I've heard them asking questions like:
* so why did Tusk (the PM conflicted with President) even allow them to fly? (false)
* so why did they give away the investigation to Russians? (false)
* so why didn't Russia return the wreck? (true)
...all of which they perceive as evidence that the three official investigations were rigged, and the plane somehow magically flew itself into the ground.
@kravietz Russia never handed back the wreckage?
No!
Russian Investigative Committee still says "investigation is still ongoing" as of 2020 😂
Of course, they are just playing Poles who love fight between themselves, and this topic is extremely incendiary in Poland, allowing everyone blame everyone else on "not getting the wreck back".
That's a whole separate story, but it has nothing to do with the original cause of the crash.
Now, on more personal angle, the crash has been highly divisive in Poland.
Large part of society simply refused to believe, against all available evidence, that the Polish pilots could have simply flown into terrain while TAWS was screaming TERRAIN AHEAD.
The main problem is that before Smoleńsk there were already *three* military aircraft crashes, very similar to Smoleńsk - risky decisions, in violation of any safety rules, poor weather.