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The Katyn Massacre

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On April 10, 2010, an unforeseen tragedy struck the Polish nation. Their current president at the time, Lech Kaczynski, died in a plane crash along with 95 other Polish officials. Up until this date, any country’s president has never died as a result of a plane crash. Ironically, the members on the plane were all traveling to the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre which were a series of mass executions of Polish nationals in Katyn forest. This event caused much bewilderment within the country causing many Poles to claim that this incident was done purposely by the Russian government. Although evidence proves that the crash was an accident, due to its peculiar conditions and the human nature to come up with conspiracies, many Poles were …show more content…

The captain of this flight, Arkadiusz Protasiuk, had an increased workload potentially impairing his ability to focus primarily on his duty to fly the plane due to the Russian’s inability to provide the flight with a “Leaderman”. Normally, radio communications are handled by another crew member while a pilot flies. Smolensk airport, however, is not usually open for international flights and is not ICAO certified causing its air traffic controllers to not be required to speak fluent English. In this case, all communication between Smolensk and the plane were to be carried out in Russian. Russian law requires all international flights landing at military airports to have a Russian “Leaderman” who would be responsible for all of the communication done in Russian. As Poland was requesting their flight in the middle of March, they asked for the service of a “Leaderman”, but claim that Russia did not reply to this request. According to a Polish article posted on Newsweek and the Final Report, Russia did offer the service, but Poland refused claiming that their crew had

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