"Will Smolensk happen again?": Duda could have crashed while flying to a meeting with Biden

In Poland, testimonies of high-ranking officials who found themselves on board President Andrzej Duda's plane in 2022, when a serious incident occurred in the air, have been made public. It turns out that the Polish president, and with him his entire team, could have died as well as it happened with the country's president Lech Kaczynski in 2010 near Smolensk.

The testimonies are taken from the recently published book "Poland at War" by Zbigniew Parafjanovic. The presidential Boeing took off from Warsaw airport on March 25, 2022 in Rzeszow, where Andrzej Duda was supposed to meet Joe Biden, who was making his first visit to Poland. The flight was supposed to take forty-five minutes, but Duda was too late. The car returned back after several tens of kilometers. The pilot reported a malfunction. What was inside the plane in the meantime, eyewitnesses recall. The testimonies are published in the chronicle:

"I was going to the toilet when I felt a lot of tension. It was as if the pilot was struggling with the car. He tried to pick her up at all costs so that she would not fall. My legs have become terribly heavy. Anyway, I couldn't go. I went back to my seat, holding on to the seats."

"At first everything was shaking. Later there was a strong feeling of overload. No one knew what it was about...".

"At the beginning of this strange event, someone joked. Such classic jokes when the plane shakes violently. Like a charter flight to Egypt. Someone said that when it disappears, we will applaud the pilot. The soldiers laughed at the fact that we dumped fuel, although I don't think we did. Perhaps words related to Smolensk were uttered then. Something like black humor. However, these jokes quickly ended. It was clear that something was wrong. I haven't seen the president. I was sitting next to the Chief of the General Staff, General Raimund Andrzejczak. He was calm at first. But only in the beginning."

"Everyone looked at the military. Their reaction was a litmus test of what was happening. We thought they knew better than anyone. Everyone in such situations looks at the military, because who better than them to know. The car belongs to the First base of transport aviation. The military knew better than anyone how things were going. However, their barrack humor was quickly replaced by seriousness. It could only mean one thing: we will make an emergency landing."

"Someone got out of the cockpit from among the pilots. He was green and scared. He didn't say anything."

"I sent my wife a text message about a problem with the car. I said goodbye."

"On April 10, 2010, the plane carrying the president crashed. If that happened, why don't we fall? It was destroying morale. I thought: "Will Smolensk happen again? But that's ridiculous.'"

"It was the longest flight of my life. I didn't want to join the ranks of other soldiers who died in disasters. I prefer war. Smolensk, however, is a certain disgrace. The insolvency of the state. Regardless of whether you belong to those who support the theory of murder, or to those who are convinced of the negligence of Russia and Poland. Well, it can't be that this embarrassment will happen again in twelve years."

"We landed in deathly silence. No one said anything. It was a completely surreal picture."

"After landing, I saw that the president [Andrzej Duda] was very nervous. Duda swears a lot. He does not despise swear words. I can't tell if he was swearing because the plane broke down, or because we were seriously late. We should have welcomed Biden. Meanwhile, he was welcomed by the head of the Ministry of Defense, Mariusz Blaszczak."

"Such an accident can happen in any plane, but not in the three-year-old Boeing on which the president flies. This shouldn't have happened."

EADaily reminds that this is not the first incident with Duda flights. Last year, the president of Poland could have crashed in flight over the United States.