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A catastrophe on the scale of the Smolensk air disaster is hard to take in, under any circumstances.

But one that more or less decapitates a country, taking away its president, many of its top politicians, its military and security service leaders, the president of the national bank and even its leading clergymen, all in the blink of an eye, is bound to be truly traumatic.

And the last thing anyone wants to have to deal with is any suspicion that the crash was anything but a horrific accident, caused by bad weather, bad luck and perhaps the inevitable element of human error.

Initial impressions seemed to confirm this was the case. The fog was definitely getting worse as the doomed flight neared Smolensk and the last flight in, a big military AWACS jet, had taken a quick look and diverted to Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, 250 miles away.

Twenty minutes later, as the Tupolev started its approach, Smolensk ground control warned that visibility was terrible and conditions were not good enough for a landing. Even when the warning was repeated, the plane kept on coming.

Several different factors seem to have played a part in the crash. Because the Russian-built Tu-154 spent most of its days flying in and out of Western airports, it had been modified to use Western-style instrument landing systems (ILS). But there was no ILS at Smolensk – just non-directional beacons at each end of the runway. These give pilots information about their position relative to the line of the runway, but don’t, crucially, give any information about height.

Like all airliners these days, the plane did have a modern terrain awareness and warning system (TAWS). These devices have virtually wiped out the dreaded controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents that used to account for most aviation deaths, giving pilots the unmissable warning of a whooping siren and a voice saying ‘Pull up, pull up’ whenever the plane gets too low. And, although the mixed use military/civil airport at Smolensk is not on the global TAWS database, the cockpit voice recorder from the crashed Tupolev shows that the TAWS did its job.

Bilingual Russian/Polish transcripts from the cockpit voice recording show that the TAWS gave its first ‘Terrain ahead’ message as the plane came down through the 1,000-feet mark.

This was repeated several times before, at 300 feet, the more urgent ‘Pull up, pull up’ alert rang out. The warning came again and again, and was ignored seven more times over the next eighteen seconds as the plane flew on and on and eventually hit the trees. Why the crew didn’t respond to the life-saving warning is still a mystery.