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Just wanted to point out these troubling paragraphs...
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“Russian investigators said Thursday that initial findings from the jet’s data and flight voice recorders said the crew may not have been aware of the particularities of the plane when they repeatedly tried to land.

“An analysis of the evidence, including the first results from the decoding of the black boxes, shows that an error in piloting led to the disaster,” the Interfax news agency quoted a source close to the investigation as saying.

The official said it appeared that the plane tried to land by levelling out its oblique descent approach to a horizontal angle in a bid to compensate for the bad weather.

But the source said a “particularity of the plane is that if its speed of descent is more that six metres per second, when the plane equalized and goes into a horizontal flight it loses altitude,” the source said.”
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SO... Russia is saying that the (military) pilots were not familiar with the President’s plane — or is it that they changed something when it underwent it’s “repairs” or “renovations” in Russia last December??? I find it EXTREMELY hard to believe that the pilots were unaware of this particularity (peculiarity) of their own plane while landing in bad weather???

I’m not a pilot, but I find this VERY hard to believe frankly...

Don’t know if others know this or not, but Interfax is a Russian newspaper very close to the Kremlin, still.

LIZOL — What is the feeling in the country if I may ask? Are people believing this was purely an accident, or do you think more people are thinking there was something odd about all of this? Wanted to tell you again, that you and all your fellow citizens in Poland are in my prayers.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2494067/posts

FYI ...

The path of the aircraft was not only off on height, it looks like it was left of centerline to the runway.

Not only that, there was the theory that the approach was lower (in a valley) then the actual airport but by the photos, the first contact with a tree shows the tree up high on elevation and what looks to be some type of shallow valley ahead with another ridge further away.

The TU-154 is a near copy of the old Boeing 727.

Now, the 727 was a fine plane, of which thousands were ultimately made; but it had some dicey characteristics on landing, which early on caused accidents and near-accidents.

Boeing finally revised the landing procedure to keep it safely airborne until touchdown; mainly by flying it onto the deck hot. (Sounds like a carrier landing to me!)

Anyone who has actual experience flying a 727, feel free to comment.

Maybe the Tupolev has a similar problem that the pilots were not adequately trained for.

[[I wonder whether anyone ever called a Tu-154 stew a "Tupolev honey?"]]

The official said it appeared that the plane tried to land by levelling out its oblique descent approach to a horizontal angle in a bid to compensate for the bad weather.

But the source said a “particularity of the plane is that if its speed of descent is more that six metres per second, when the plane equalized and goes into a horizontal flight it loses altitude,” the source said.”

I'm a pilot, and all I see in those two sentences is gibberish and more gibberish. I'm not even sure what they are saying! Something about changing the approach angle that almost makes sense, then complete gibberish about the plane "equalizing" and "going into" horizontal flight? Makes me wonder WFT the crash had to do with the cabin pressurization system, and what the VTOL Tupelov 124 looks like, anyway. Complete nonsense.