MOSCOW — Aviation authorities offered new details of the plane crash that killed Poland’s president and dozens of other top officials last month, including the revelation that two or more passengers were in the cockpit shortly before the pilots tried to land the aircraft in dense fog.
In a news conference held by officials of Russia and Poland on Wednesday, Edmund Klich, an envoy from the Polish government, said that the cockpit voice recorder showed that the unidentified passengers were speaking in the cockpit 16 to 20 minutes before the April 10 plane crash. The pilots had received at least one warning of poor landing conditions by that point.
The news fueled widespread speculation that the pilots were pressed to land so that President Lech Kaczynski and other dignitaries would not be late for their landmark appearance at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, in which the Soviets killed more than 20,000 Polish officers and others during World War II.
The aviation officials ruled out the possibility of technical failure, sabotage or terrorism, but offered no definitive conclusion as to what could have caused the retrofitted Tupolev TU-154 to slam into the trees just shy of a western Russian airport.
They said that investigators were exploring whether cellphone use on board the plane or crew inexperience was a factor, and that the presence of the passengers in the cockpit was also being examined.
“It has been established that in the cockpit, there were individuals that were not members of the crew,” said Tatyana Anodina, the head of the Interstate Aviation Committee, a regulatory body.
“As for the influence on the decision making of the crew, this should be investigated,” she said. “This is important for the investigation and for establishing the cause” of the crash.
Ms. Anodina said that one passenger recorded in the cockpit had been identified, but that aviation rules prohibited her from naming that person or releasing any details about what was said in the cockpit.
On Wednesday, the Polish news agency PAP cited anonymous officials in the Polish government who identified one of the passengers recorded in the cockpit as the commander of Poland’s air force, Gen. Andrzej Blasik.
Though Mr. Kaczynski had often clashed with Russia’s leaders, his planned attendance at the memorial service to mark the Katyn massacre was seen by many as an indication that Russia and Poland had overcome years of bitterness and that relations had begun to improve.
Mr. Kaczynski’s delegation — 96 people in all, including the president’s wife — was already an hour and a half behind schedule when the plane took off from Poland for a military airfield in Smolensk, in western Russia, said Aleksei Morozov, another official with the Interstate Aviation Committee.
As the plane approached the airport, air traffic controllers and other pilots in the vicinity repeatedly warned that weather conditions were unfavorable for landing. The first warning came 27 minutes before the crash from dispatchers in Belarus, and was followed by two more from ground crews at the Smolensk airport.
About 11 minutes before the crash, the crew was informed that a Russian plane had failed at two landing attempts and had been diverted to an alternative airport. About four minutes before the crash, Mr. Morozov said, the crew was told that visibility had dropped to around 650 feet because of heavy fog.
The four-person crew, which Mr. Morozov said had been assembled a few days earlier and had received minimal emergency training, ignored the warnings and requested clearance for a landing attempt.
About 18 seconds before the crash, an alarm sounded, warning the pilots to immediately increase altitude. For unknown reasons the pilots did not respond. The plane began to break up after its left wing hit a birch tree that was 12 to 16 inches in diameter, Mr. Morozov said.
“From the time the fuselage started to break up,” he said, “until its complete destruction due to its upside-down impact with the ground took five to six seconds.”
Joanna Berendt
