Pilots of the aircraft which crashed with Poland's president Lech Kaczynski on-board received at least a dozen warnings from the plane's systems to regain altitude during the last minute before the crash, according to transcripts from its cockpit recorders released today.
Prime minister Donald Tusk's government decided to publish the transcripts to end media speculation about the reasons for the April 10th crash, which also killed Poland's top military commanders, its central bank governor and many lsenior politicians and officials.
"Pull up, pull up... Terrain ahead," the on-board warning system told the pilots numerous times just before the crash. It was not clear from the transcripts why the pilots only tried to pull higher when it was already too late.
One of the pilots cursed after the plane hit a tree, which flipped the Tuploev Tu-154 military plane upside down. The last sound recorded was a prolonged curse by an unidentified person in the cockpit.
Polish media have speculated that Mr Kaczynski himself may have contributed to the crash by encouraging pilots to disregard Russian traffic controllers' advice and to land the plane despite the poor weather conditions.
The transcript provided no evidence of this, though three minutes before the crash it quoted an unidentified person in the cockpit as saying: "(S)he will be annoyed if..."
It did not make clear who the subject of the sentence was and the transcript said the rest of the sentence was unintelligible.
Mr Kaczynski and his entourage had been running late for a planned ceremony in nearby Katyn forest marking the 70th anniversary of the murder of some 22,000 Polish army officers and intellectuals there by the Soviet NKVD secret police.
Some 15 minutes before the crash, the pilots told the head of Poland's diplomatic protocol, Mariusz Kazana, who was in the cockpit, that the plane would not be able to land because of the thick fog, according to the transcripts.
"Well then we have a problem," Mr Kazana replied. A few minutes later, he returned to the cockpit to say the president had not yet made a decision about what they should do next.
Russia, which is conducting its own investigation into the crash, handed over copies of the cockpit recordings to Poland's minister for internal affairs Jerzy Miller on Monday.
The original black box recordings will stay in Russia until the investigation is completed.
A Polish prosecutor who took part in a Russian investigation into the crash has said he believes poor training, lack of money for test flights and incorrect flight procedures in the Polish air force all contributed to the disaster.
Reuters