Poland’s government harbours an unhealthy resentment over the presidential Tu-154 crash in Smolensk, now manifesting itself as a delusional farce.

Loss of the aircraft, president Lech Kaczynski, and dozens of senior officials in the same forests as the 1940 Katyn massacre was, to crackpot conspiracy theorists, a poisonous selection box of connivance and treachery gift-wrapped by arch-nemesis Russia.

But the paranoia is not limited to a select group of harmless loners in tin-foil hats. The reinvestigation into the 2010 accident, and high-profile attendance of government figures at the premiere of a feature film supporting the conspiratorial agenda, shows it extends to the highest ranks of the Polish administration.

That the Polish government publicly buys into this codswallop just underlines the observation that it is a government in denial, one which shamefully refuses to acknowledge and accept the plethora of solid evidence pinning the crash firmly on dreadful airmanship from its own personnel.

Quite whom it thinks it is fooling, other than itself, is anyone’s guess. But its gross attempt to shirk responsibility, no less disgraceful and unconvincing as Russia’s own pathetic deflective wittering over the downing of flight MH17, amounts to cowardice on a monumental level which does nothing, in the least, for the cause of air safety.

Source: Flight International