Featured Image Credit: NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images
Topics: Russia
James Moorhouse
It's been 15 years since one of the most deadly plane crashes in history but one major question remains unanswered.
Plane crashes might feel like they're happening far more than often right now but the reality is that the most tragic crashes are dotted throughout history.
It's often easy to blame the pilot or technical problems when people are killed in a crash but in the case of a 2010 accident in Russia, there were multiple decisions which led to 96 people tragically losing their lives.
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The pilot, whose final words from the flight have also been revealed, was flying the polish president Lech Kaczynski and several other high-ranking Polish officials to Smolensk, Russia, with the hope of attending a memorial service on the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre.
While he seemingly ignored a crucial warning, which would obviously prove fatal, it seems as if he escapes the blame due to the reported pressure that was put on him by the president to land the plane despite the dense fog at the time.
This, combined with the language problems between Russian air traffic controllers and Polish pilots, also reportedly led to the deadly crash.
The plane tried to land despite air traffic controllers warning them 'not to do so' and the Tuploev 154 military vessel ended up plummeting into a wooded area, flipping over and rolling before bursting into flames, killing everyone on board.
As per The Guardian, the former social democrat prime minister Leszek Miller said: "The president had wanted so much to be there. The pilot knew this and so they accepted the risk and in the process they lost everything."
However, with so many people high up in the Polish government sadly dying, the major question of why so many of them had been allowed to be on the same flight was quickly posed.
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Following the crash, military expert Wojciech Luczak said: "How is it possible that all these top people came to be travelling on the same plane?"
Bronislaw Komorowski, who was named the acting president in the wake of the crash, quickly moved to replace some of those who had passed away.
"The first task I am going to set for the new National Security Bureau chief is a review of the rules for travel of top military officials," he told reporters.
Komorowski was later named president and served between 2010 and 2015 as the fifth president of the eastern European country.
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You likely wouldn't see so many high-ranking people on the same flight these days, with private jets far more common among the elite, but it is definitely a valid question to ask why so many of the country's most powerful people were together on the plane before the tragic incident.