The Polish investigation committee of 34 experts has published a report into the last April Smolensk air crash that killed the country's president Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 top-officials. It made no revelations but admitted that Poland was mainly responsible for the crash.

The country's Defense Minister Bogdan Klich resigned right after the 380-page document had been published.

It took Poland's government 15 months to conduct a probe, approve it at different stages and translate into English and Russian. Even before the publishing, experts were saying that the document would reveal nothing new and give no names of the guilty, and they were right. Still, unexpectedly, the committee's members and its head Jerzy Miller, Poland's Interior Minister, were telling reporters about a chain of fatal errors which led to the tragedy.

The main reason for the accident was a decision not to divert the plane to another airport with better visibility and weather conditions. This means that the crew was under pressure from a high-ranking passenger who was to decide where to land. It also appeared that preparation for the flight was inadequate.

First, the Tupolev Tu-154 was remodeled to carry more passengers, the crew was half an hour late, the second pilot didn't check the equipment and the captain didn't take a Russian-speaking aid. Maciej Lasek, a member of the investigative committee, told reporters more:

"There were serious shortcomings in the organization of the air force unit 36 responsible for VIP flights. In order for the unit to carry out its tasks, deliberate decisions were made to disregard or break procedures, to conduct training not in line with training regulations. Pilots straight out of flying schools were accepted and no training flights were carried out. The inexperienced pilots had inadequate training, little time in flight simulators. Only one technician had clearance for flights on that day. The crew's unpreparedness threatened safety."

These are direct signs of a poor work of the country's Minister of Defense that is responsible for government flights. That's why Klich had resigned and Donald Tusk, the Polish PM, accepted his resignation.

"I accept Klich's resignation but this doesn't mean that he is guilty of the tragedy. His resignation means that it will be hard to carry on in such circumstances and I highly assess his work."

Obviously, Klich will not be the only top military man to see sacking and demotion. The report says that the crew was in a difficult situation as they were ordered to land by the Air Force Commander General Andrzej Wlasik who was at the cockpit though he wasn't supposed to.

The committee has reconstructed the last minutes of the flight even simulating it on TU-154 simulators and the result was the same - the unprepared crew landed disregarding the course and misjudging their altitude which appeared too low to pull up.

The committee's member Weslaw Yedinak said

"The crew's main error was to having followed radio altimeter instead of barometer and to having ignored "pull up" warnings by the aircraft's terrain proximity warning system. They couldn't react swiftly as they lacked coordination of their actions."

However, Poland also blamed Russia for certain things, saying that Smolensk airport had poorly maintained equipment and inadequate lighting for the foggy conditions.

The report also concluded that mistakes by Russian air traffic control contributed to the disaster. Juan Carlos Lozano, the head of the International Federation of Airline Pilots' Associations, told the VoR that air traffic controllers can't be blamed:

"This is not a typical commercial passenger flight, but a state flight where the conditions are different from commercial aviation. TU-154 is a civil aircraft butthe crew was military and people aboard were VIPs, that is very important persons. These two things made the crash very specific. The crew didn't make a timely decision to take the plane to the alternative airport, which I find the most important factor in this accident. It was clear that the airport in Smolensk was behind minimum requirements in terms of meteorology to make a safe landing and the crew didn't take this into account. We can discuss why this happened forever, but it's clear that the Polish government was going to a very important event near Smolensk, in Katyn, so it was important for the pilots to land in Smolensk but from a professional point of view the decision to divert to an alternative airport was crucial at that time. As I can judge by the report, another crew of Polish Air Force, that landed well before the plane crashed, advised the pilot that visibility was below minimum."

Still, this is not the end. Other probes are being carried out by Poland's Prosecutor's Office and Supreme Control Chamber who are to name specific individuals guilty of the crash. The media say that such a list exists but it's classified. Meanwhile, the Interstate Aviation Committee found the report's conclusions similar to those it made in January with some statements remaining doubtful.

However, PM Tusk seems to have no doubts saying that he's satisfied with the work and hoping that the report will provide for good Russian-Polish relations.