Kulverstukas
Well, I know all that, of course. BUT, everyone knew all along that Smolensk Severny was pretty much an abandoned military airport, not maintained properly. And yet, they insisted on flying there pretty much all the time because it made it convenient to do frequent political dog and pony shows at Katyn, and all.
So, pretty much they are now saying SOMEONE should have prevented them from flying there because the airport was not up to specs, did not have ILS, etc, etc.
But, the thing is, the reason they were allowed to fly there was that if they were not, they would scream that it was all for political reasons to prevent them from going to Katyn.
The ONLY good thing that can come out of it on both side is this:
Neither Russian ATC nor Polish pilots should have been pressured by any political considerations in doing their jobs. The old post Soviet culture (on both sides) makes both the pilots and the ATCs into insignificant pawns in the political game. They are not allowed to make decisions independently, on their own, without involvement of politicians.
The big "smoking gun" that they (polish politicians) are trying to drag out tomorrow is precisely that the pilots are not at fault because the ATC was supposedly not allowed to make his own decisions and the Russian politicians were involved in his decision process. For that purpose they say they will publish the recordings of conversations at the tower. They pretend they did not get the recordings from the MAC/IAC in spite of asking for them but nevertheless got them by other means.
So, here is what I say. The sane people on both sides can use this mess to free the professionals from politicians at least a little bit.