Polish Plane Crash: What Happened in the Cockpit?

April 12, 2010 — -- Investigators in Moscow who studied flight recorders from the plane crash that killed the Polish president said the pilot was warned of bad weather and that there was apparently nothing technically wrong with the aircraft.

The recordings, according to Russian news broadcasts, indicated that the pilot struggled to communicate in Russian with the control tower below. Ground control warned the pilot not to land because of poor weather.

Minutes before the plane crashed Polish president Lech Kacynski called his twin brother and told him everything was fine and the plane would be landing shortly.

Kacynski's daughter and twin brother received his body today, which will lie in state Tuesday. Families of those on the plane are still working to identify their remains, including the family of the first lady, the AP reported.

Aviation expert and ABC News consultant John Nance said the added pressure of carrying dignitaries can affect a pilot's decision making abilities.

"When a pilot puts pressure on himself or herself, it can be a very bad result," Nance said. "Unfortunately, when you've got the head of a country on board and you've got a lot of dignitaries, you want to get them where they want to go. That kind of pressure can override good sense."

Kacynski has a history of trying to pull rank on pilots. In 2008 he ordered a plane to land in war-torn Georgia where it wasn't safe. The pilot refused.

Russia Shows Deep Support

Hours after the crash, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin flew to Smolensk, where he met Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The fatal plane crash Saturday carried Kaczynski and 95 other top Polish government, military and religious leaders.

Russia's active involvement in the investigation signaled what one Polish correspondent called a "turning point" in relations between the two nations.

"It is the first time I saw Putin truly moved and upset as he hugged Tusk," Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich, a longtime correspondent of Polish media in Russia and an author of many books on contemporary Russia, said. "This is a real turning point."

Putin told Russian TV: "This is first and foremost Poland's tragedy and that of the Polish people -- but this is also our tragedy, and we mourn with you and grieve with you."

A clearly upset Medvedev made a televised address Saturday, saying the Smolensk tragedy was "unprecedented" and ordered a national day of mourning in Russia Monday.

A survey published several weeks ago in Moscow showed that only 18 percent of Russians interviewed knew the truth about the massacre at Katyn. The Katyn Forest is where 22,000 of Poland's best and brightest were executed in a WWII massacre in the spring of 1940 carried out by NVDK, the forerunner of the KGB, Joseph Stalin's secret police.

That is probable to change Sunday night, when the film "Katyn," by well-known Polish director Andrzej Wajda, will air on Russian state TV, another step seen as significant effort of New Kremlin sympathies to Poles.

Wajda's father, a Polish cavalry officer, was killed at Katyn.

Katyn stands out as Poland's darkest event entrenched in national psychology for three generations. During the communist regime, which lasted for 45 years, Poles were only allowed to whisper about it. In schoolbooks the slaughter was attributed to Germans.