The aircraft descended far below the normal approach path until it struck trees, rolled, inverted and crashed into the ground, coming to rest in a wooded area a short distance from the runway.

Simultaneously with this final call, the control column was pulled full aft, commanding max pitch up from the aircraft, and the throttles were moved within one second from their flight idle positions to maximum power.

[47] Ewa Kopacz, former Polish Minister of Health, claimed before the Sejm that after the crash, ground was dug to a depth of one metre, and even if a tiny piece of human flesh was found, it was genetically tested.

[53] The Captain had landed in Smolensk three days before the crash, when he was part of the crew bringing Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to the 7 April ceremony, and at the time no communication problems with ground control were reported.

[62] An initial report by the CIS Interstate Aviation Committee (Russian: Межгосударственный авиационный комитет (MAK)) revealed that all three engines were operating normally, and that there was no fire or explosion before the aircraft crashed.

Alexei Morozov, the head of the technical commission of Russia's Interstate Aviation Committee, stated that the Tupolev Tu-154M had no mechanical faults, and that an air traffic control official at Smolensk North Airport had "warned twice that visibility was 400 metres (1,312ft) and that were no conditions for landing".

[citation needed] According to the report, the crew of the Tupolev Tu-154M failed to respond for 13 seconds when the plane's "terrain approaching" alarm warned that the aircraft was less than 100 metres (330 ft) from the ground.

[citation needed] The transcript confirmed earlier reports that the aircraft had attempted to land in bad weather against the advice of air traffic control and the plane's terrain awareness warning system.

The Polish report also placed harsh criticism on the organization of Poland's special aviation regiment and its leaders, as well as finding deficiencies in the performance of the Russian air traffic controllers and in the airport's lighting and approach area.

"[13] Taking into consideration the terrain at Smolensk, the investigation determined the last moment a go-around manoeuvre would have been successful was coincident with the first officer calling "Go around" and briefly pulling the control column at 60 metres (200 ft).

[13] Additionally, the IAC report found an "immediate cause" of the accident was the presence in the cockpit of the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Air Force, which placed extreme stress and "psychological pressure" on the Captain to "continue descent in conditions of unjustified risk with a dominating aim of landing at any means.

[citation needed] Another major difference was a conclusion that Russian air traffic control played a part in the accident by passing incorrect information to the crew regarding the plane's position.

[citation needed] The commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre was split up because of the political conflict between the liberal-conservative government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and national-conservative President Kaczyński.

Many passengers were actively opposed to Tusk's policies, including: The president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers and former CIA analyst, S. Eugene Poteat, has written that political violence should not be ruled out under the circumstances of the aircraft crash.

[119] On 11 April, Kaczyński's body was flown to Warsaw on a military plane; tens of thousands of Poles gathered at both the airport tarmac and the streets of the city to pay their respects to the late president as his casket was driven by hearse to the Presidential Palace.

[citation needed] The first showing of Katyń was a political event, which was followed by a serious discussion of Polish-Russian relations by politicians and public figures,[137] and drew high audience numbers for the smaller channel,[138] with an estimated 100 million Russian viewers.

"[134] As part of this thawing of relations, on 28 April 18 days after the crash, Russia's state Archive publicly published a number of previously secret files on the Katyn massacre on their website.

[144] Twenty-three countries observed a varying number of days of official mourning; Brazil: 3,[145] Bulgaria: 1,[146] Canada: 1,[113] Cape Verde: 1,[147] Croatia: 1,[148] Czech Republic: 2,[149] Estonia: 1,[145] Germany: 1,[150] Georgia: 1,[151] Hungary: 1,[152] Latvia: 1,[145] Lithuania: 4,[145][153] Maldives: 2,[154] Moldova: 1,[145] Montenegro: 1,[155] Poland: 9,[156] Romania: 1,[157] Russia: 1,[citation needed] Serbia: 1,[158] Slovakia: 1,[159] Spain: 1,[160] Turkey: 1,[145] Ukraine: 1.

[169] Conspiracy theories have been in circulation since the day of the accident, claiming in general that the crash was in fact a political assassination, an act of war against Poland or an elaborate coup attempt, possibly orchestrated by Russia.

[172] Law and Justice's leader Jarosław Kaczyński and the head of the parliamentary committee of investigation Antoni Macierewicz have been described as long time supporters of the assassination theory, and have repeatedly accused the then prime minister Donald Tusk of being involved in a cover-up.

[191] According to Polish experts, trace amounts of high explosives could be present in the aeroplane due to frequent presence of military personnel onboard, or as result of contamination on the ground (Smolensk area was a battlefield during World War II).

[203] The committee's conclusions were partly based on a paper by Wiesław Binienda of the University of Akron, in which the author presented computer simulations that claimed to prove that the impact with the birch tree could not have severed the plane's wing.

[83] In February 2016, Macierewicz announced the official reopening of the investigation in the so-called Subcommittee for the Re-investigation of the Smolensk Air Crash (Polish: Podkomisja do spraw Ponownego Zbadania Wypadku Lotniczego), declaring that the previous inquiries were "riddled with mistakes" and reaffirming his belief that the aircraft disintegrated mid-air immediately before impacting the ground.

[232] Law and Justice MEP Beata Gosiewska, who had unsuccessfully requested a written version of the final report from Macierewicz, accused him of turning the investigation into an object of ridicule and of exploiting the disaster to advance his political career.

[7] On the twelfth anniversary of the Smolensk disaster, 10 April 2022, both Macierewicz and Kaczyński alluded to the imminent publication of the subcommittee's final report whilst again painting the crash as a deliberate act.

TVN responded by accusing the Council of trying to clamp down on journalistic criticism of the Commission, and proceeded to make The Power of Lies available for free on its Czarno na białym YouTube channel.

Antoni Macierewicz responded by insisting on the subcommittee's independence, by saying that Kosiniak-Kamysz had no legal right to dissolve it before the planned date of completion of its work in August 2024 nor to accept or reject its report, and by calling Tomczyk's comments nonsensical.

[254] On 2 February 2024, a court ordered Macierewicz to apologise for a May 2020 tweet in which he had claimed that Donald Tusk, Radosław Sikorski, and Tomasz Siemoniak had been "harbouring criminals, the perpetrators of the Smolensk Tragedy" for "10 YEARS, 122 months, 528 weeks, 3699 days".

[255] On 10 October 2024, Cezary Tomczyk announced the Ministry of National Defence's intention to inform prosecutors about potential criminal damage which he claimed that the subcommittee had inflicted on Tu-154M 102, the sister aircraft to the crashed Tu-154M 101.

[173] Following the first weeks of the invasion, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared to give credence to the theory in his March 2022 address to the Polish Sejm, speaking of the "silence of those who knew exactly everything but still looked constantly at our neighbour [Russia]".