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Transcripts from Polish air disaster released

Wednesday 02 June 2010 00:00 BST
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Pilots of the doomed aircraft carrying Poland's President Lech Kaczynski received at least a dozen warnings from on-board systems to regain altitude during the last minute before the crash, according to transcripts from its cockpit recorders which were released yesterday.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government decided to publish the transcripts to quell speculation about the reasons for the 10 April crash, in which all of the 96 passengers were killed, including Poland's top military commanders, its central bank governor and many MPs.

"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 the plane higher when it was already too late.

Polish media has speculated that Kaczynski himself may have contributed to the crash by encouraging pilots to disregard traffic controllers' advice and land despite poor weather. The transcript provided no evidence of this, although three minutes before impact it quoted an unidentified person in the cockpit as saying: "[S]he will be annoyed if...".

One of the pilots cursed after the Tupolev Tu-154 military plane hit a tree – a collision that flipped it upside-down. The last sound recorded was a prolonged expletive uttered by an unidentified person in the cockpit, before the plane went down near Smolensk, Russia.

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