At 0841 local time on April 10, 2010, a Tupolev 154M passenger jet carrying the president of Poland, his wife and numerous government officials crashed about 1 km (0.6 mi) from the Smolensk Airport in Russia, killing all 96 people aboard. Short of the runway, the plane struck trees and broke apart. Preliminary reports say the flight crew had been warned of reduced visibility and was told to divert to another airport, and that they attempted the landing anyway. Regardless of whatever factor is eventually designated as the primary cause of the crash, fog clearly limited the airport’s visibility.
Aviation accidents in which fog plays a major role often prove fatal. The worst aviation disaster of all time, the collision of two Boeing 747s in Tenerife, Canary Islands, involved fog. The captain of the departing aircraft and the traffic control tower could not see that the landing 747 was still on the runway, leading to the crash that killed 583 people.
To review the basics, fog is simply…
