With the state funeral of President Kaczynski completed, attention now will turn to the cause of the crash at Smolensk airport.

Not before a surprisingly weak article by Denis Dutton and Adam Chmielewski appears at Open Democracy:

The air-crash which decapitated Poland’s state elite may owe something to reckless behaviour, official negligence – and the flaws of modern democracy itself

The judgment must be that Polish officialdom has not learned the lesson of this recent tragedy. Indeed, there is a suggestion of grave irresponsibility surrounding this ill-fated trip. The fact that so many people of senior rank were loaded onto a single plane created evident risks and ignored the procedural rule that the president should not travel with others who occupy high state positions…

Polish politicians, as do those in most democratic countries, live in mortal fear of the media and the opposition. For years some of them have mumbled about the necessity of upgrading the government’s air-fleet; but no decision was made, for fear of the response that state officials wish to enjoy the luxuries of new planes at the expense of impoverished taxpayers…

We share the grief of this terrible event. But we also feel angry that a democratic state might have done such damage to itself through the irresponsibility or recklessness of its own officials.

Here is the comment I posted there:

[T]here are many subtle ways in which this accident might have been caused, which operate on a level which do not justify such bold conclusions as " reckless behaviour, official negligence – and the flaws of modern democracy itself".

Thus perhaps the pilot made an unaccountable mistake of fact – he eg misread the aircraft dials and acted accordingly. Or he made a mistake of judgement – eg he read the equipment accurately but made a wrong conclusion. Or as he approached the airport, the scale of the fog a few kilometres ahead on the ground was not evident; he acted properly with the level of information available to him

Or something perhaps was lost momentarily in translation or interpretation of ground crew instructions/suggestions (the crew communicated with the ground in Russian, not the usual English).

Plus there may have been psychological factors in play. President Kaczynski will not have wanted to hear Russian suggestions that the plane divert to Minsk, occasioning a tedious car journey and very late (and therefore humiliating) arrival at Katyn. Did he order the pilot to take an undue risk? Or did the pilot not need to be ordered, preferring not to pose the question and risk a row?

And maybe, all things considered, the risky course would have been safe had it not been for one extra tall tree which happened to be in the flight-path? Had the plane taken a chance yet landed normally, this article would not have been written.

My point is that a huge amount of what we all do, governments included, often comes down to very fine judgements which are tricky to analyse accurately afterwards when things go wrong.

Buying a new expensive aircraft for official civilian travel (and not eg an extra F-16) may or may not be a good decision. But what if a brand new plane had crashed like this one because accumulated micro-decisions combined with abrupt localised thick fog and one very tall tree? Remember the excellent Airbus which crashed over Siberia because the pilot let his child play with the controls?

Are such tragedies really symptomatic of ‘deeper’ problems? Or just part of the natural way we manage risk at all levels every day everywhere, a consequence of which is that now and again some really bad things happen?

Would striving to prevent every possible accident (as per the ruinous ‘precautionary principle’) instead create new, different disasters?

Other good comments there too.

It is not clear to me why it takes so long to acquire then publish the data from the Black Box. Some facts are oozing out in an unsatisfactory way.

The Polish/Russian media are saying that the Box did not show that the President urged the pilots to attempt a risky landing, and that there were audible screams in the final seconds. There are suggestions that ‘intimate’ exchanges from the voice recorder will not be published.

President Kaczynski for sure would have been deeply unimpressed with any suggestion that the plane divert to Minsk or Moscow because of adverse weather conditions.

He would have known that following the successful Katyn commemoration featuring Polish and Russian PMs Tusk and Putin, his separate commemorative event risked being spoiled by media tittering over his ‘foggy’ foreign policy or somesuch.

Plus he might well have suspected that the Russians somehow were exaggerating the weather conditions if only for the pleasure of seeing him make a long and tedious and embarrassing drive to Katyn.

So were those sentiments or something similar conveyed to the aircrew? Or did they know that and not need to ask the President for a view.

One way or the other, does it matter?

Had the pilot taken a calculated risk of some sort and landed safely, we never would have known.

My own guess is that it was a combination of the absence of normal air traffic control facilities, the fact that conversations were proceeding in Russian, the difficult weather, and maybe (ultimately) some sort of pilot misreading of the altimeter data which brought the aircraft down.

The faster the full data set is made public, the better.