Comment Re:Obvious conspiracy (Score 1) 284
I am well aware of that. The last time he tried to make the pilot land in dangerous circumstances (i. e. a freaking war going on around the destination airport) the pilot refused and landed in Azerbaijan instead. But not this time. The press reports that preliminary analysis of the black boxes doesn't reveal any pressure on pilots. Everything in this story is so suspicious that my conspiracy detector went off-scale.
An actually similar case happened to Yeltsin when he demanded that the plane lands in Heathrow and that the pilots disregard the horrible weather and multiple warnings from the airport. (They managed to land, of course.)
All except one plane crashes with heads of state on board happened to the poorest, least technically equipped countries. The only exception was a Secretary General of UN (a Swede afair) who was killed in 1960's (but also over Africa).
Also, the airbase in Smolensk where the plane was supposed to land is a semi-abandoned undermanned underequipped site. It kind of makes Russian officials who were facilitating the visit guilty of failing to provide security for their guests. Even if the guests are 'tards it is the receiving side's headache. They had to consider all cases (knowing about the 2008 landing scandal), and I'm sure they did. It actually looks like an angry neighbor who came to discuss his goat that you killed last year and suddenly fell into a branch-covered pit in the middle of your yard and broke his neck.
I am also pretty sure they don't hire rookies or daredevils as presidents' pilots, so the pilot was a moron version, in my opinion, is not the simple one, not even close, considering the following event of closing European airspace (the most large-scale event of such sort after WW2, according to Wikipedia). They don't close airspace under absurd reasons after a pilot mistake. These two are almost certainly connected, but I completely fail to see the link.