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Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility
History Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility replaces three former prisons located in Halifax County (Lower Sackville), Colchester County (Truro), and Kings County (Kentville), all of which closed in 2001. Originally construction had begun at Jack Lake, near the Bedford Rifle Range. Although surrounded by forest a...
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Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility
It was designed by the Halifax architectural firms of John K. Dobbs and Associates and William Nycum and Associates Ltd. Construction took approximately two years and was carried out by Tidewater Construction Ltd. References External links 2001 establishments in Nova Scotia Buildings and structures in Halifax, Nova Sco...
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Nuclear power plant emergency response team
A nuclear power plant emergency response team (ERT) is an incident response team composed of plant personnel and civil authority personnel specifically trained to respond to the occurrence of an accident at a nuclear power plant. Each nuclear power plant is required to have a detailed emergency plan. In the event of a...
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Nuclear power plant emergency response team
Potential duty stations include: The nuclear power plant's Control Room The nuclear power plant's Emergency Operations Facility An offsite (i.e., not near the nuclear plant) operations facility A news center Roving teams of health physicists who scan for possible radiation Police traffic direction In the United S...
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Nuclear power plant emergency response team
See also List of nuclear power stations List of nuclear reactors Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) - different from ERTs here Nuclear reactor technology References External links Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan (FRERP)--Operational Plan Federal Radiological Preparedness Coordinating Committee (FEMA) Ra...
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Mathures Paul
Mathures Paul is a journalist for The Telegraph newspaper in Calcutta, India. His articles cover a wide range of subjects, including: films, music and information & technology. He was previously with The Statesman. Some of the people he has interviewed include Astad Deboo, Indian filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee, noted bass...
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
Clan Matheson was a cargo ship that William Hamilton & Co Ltd of Port Glasgow built in 1919 as Clan Morgan for Clan Line Steamers Ltd. She was sold in 1948 and renamed Harmodius. In 1951 she was sold again and renamed Claire T. In 1955 she was bought by the Ministry of Transport (MoT) which renamed her Empire Claire. ...
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
Description William Hamilton & Co Ltd built her as yard number 311. She was a sister ship to and . She was laid down in 1917 and launched on 18 February 1919 as Clan Morgan, and completed in April that year. She was long, with a beam of and a depth of . She had a NRT of 3,458 and tonnage under deck of 6,348.
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
She had nine corrugated furnaces with a combined grate area of heating three single-ended boilers with a combined heating surface of . These produced steam at 180 lbf/in2 for a single three-cylinder triple expansion steam engine that drove a single screw propeller. David Rowan & Co Ltd of Glasgow built the engine, whi...
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
Pre-war Clan Matheson was ordered by Australian Steamship Ltd, Sydney in 1917 as the Bogong. It was later decided to rename her You Yangs. The contract was sold to Clan Line Steamers Ltd on the orders of the British Shipping Controller. Her design was modified and she was lengthened.
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
Clan Matheson was placed under the management of Cayzer, Irvine & Co Ltd, who registered her at Glasgow. Her United Kingdom official number was 141086 and her code letters were JWPR. In 1934 her code letters were replaced with the call sign GQMW. Clan Matheson was a cargo ship, and also served as a cadet training ship.
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
In 1924 the Levuana Moth (Levuana iridescens) was a serious pest to coconut palms in Fiji and a biological solution was devised. A similar moth, Artona catoxantha was known to be parasitized by Ptychomyia and Apanteles, so it was decided to use these parasites to eradicate the Levuana Moth. The parasites had to be impo...
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
Clan Line operated ships in the area. In July 1924 was sailing from Singapore to Fiji via other ports, and Clan Matheson was also due to sail from Java to Fiji. Clan Mackay took the parasites to Surabaya, Java, where they were transferred to Clan Matheson for onward shipment to Fiji. No Apanteles survived, but the Pty...
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
OG 3 In October 1939 Clan Matheson carried general cargo from Britain to East Africa. She joined Convoy OG 3, which formed at sea on 17 October 1939 and took her as far as Gibraltar. OG 22 Clan Matheson was a member of Convoy OG 22, which formed at sea on 18 March 1940 bound for Gibraltar. HX 228 In February 1943 Clan ...
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
HX 229 The following month Clan Matheson, carrying general cargo, mail and a passenger, joined Convoy HX 229 and carried the convoy's Vice Commodore. HX 229 left New York on 8 March 1943 bound for Liverpool, and Clan Matheson was meant to sail with the convoy as far as Loch Ewe, but she was unable to maintain speed and...
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
Post war In 1948 Clan Matheson was sold to British & South American Steam Navigation Co Ltd, which renamed her Harmodius and appointed Houston Line Ltd to manage her. In 1951 she was sold to the Heron Steamship Co Ltd of London who renamed her Claire T. In 1953 she was sold to the Romney Steamship Co Ltd, serving until...
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
As part of Operation Sandcastle she was loaded with obsolete war materiel which included confiscated German munitions containing Tabun. Loaded with 16,000 bombs, On 27 July 1955 Empire Claire was towed out of Stranraer and scuttled in the North Atlantic 800 miles northwest of County Donegal, Ireland at . Commemorative ...
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SS Clan Matheson (1919)
1919 ships Ships built on the River Clyde Empire ships Maritime incidents in 1955 Merchant ships of the United Kingdom Ships of the Clan Line Shipwrecks in the Atlantic Ocean Steamships of the United Kingdom
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SS Clan Matheson
Clan Matheson was the name of five steamships operated by Clan Line. , sold in 1905 and sunk in 1906. , captured and sunk in 1914 , sunk in a collision in 1918 , sold in 1948. , scrapped in 1978. Ship names
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DNA nanotechnology
DNA nanotechnology is the design and manufacture of artificial nucleic acid structures for technological uses. In this field, nucleic acids are used as non-biological engineering materials for nanotechnology rather than as the carriers of genetic information in living cells. Researchers in the field have created static...
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DNA nanotechnology
The conceptual foundation for DNA nanotechnology was first laid out by Nadrian Seeman in the early 1980s, and the field began to attract widespread interest in the mid-2000s. This use of nucleic acids is enabled by their strict base pairing rules, which cause only portions of strands with complementary base sequences t...
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DNA nanotechnology
Fundamental concepts
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DNA nanotechnology
Properties of nucleic acids Nanotechnology is often defined as the study of materials and devices with features on a scale below 100 nanometers. DNA nanotechnology, specifically, is an example of bottom-up molecular self-assembly, in which molecular components spontaneously organize into stable structures; the particu...
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DNA nanotechnology
The structure of a nucleic acid molecule consists of a sequence of nucleotides distinguished by which nucleobase they contain. In DNA, the four bases present are adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). Nucleic acids have the property that two molecules will only bind to each other to form a double hel...
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DNA nanotechnology
Subfields DNA nanotechnology is sometimes divided into two overlapping subfields: structural DNA nanotechnology and dynamic DNA nanotechnology. Structural DNA nanotechnology, sometimes abbreviated as SDN, focuses on synthesizing and characterizing nucleic acid complexes and materials that assemble into a static, equil...
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DNA nanotechnology
The complexes constructed in structural DNA nanotechnology use topologically branched nucleic acid structures containing junctions. (In contrast, most biological DNA exists as an unbranched double helix.) One of the simplest branched structures is a four-arm junction that consists of four individual DNA strands, portio...
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DNA nanotechnology
Dynamic DNA nanotechnology uses a mechanism called toehold-mediated strand displacement to allow the nucleic acid complexes to reconfigure in response to the addition of a new nucleic acid strand. In this reaction, the incoming strand binds to a single-stranded toehold region of a double-stranded complex, and then dis...
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DNA nanotechnology
Structural DNA nanotechnology Structural DNA nanotechnology, sometimes abbreviated as SDN, focuses on synthesizing and characterizing nucleic acid complexes and materials where the assembly has a static, equilibrium endpoint. The nucleic acid double helix has a robust, defined three-dimensional geometry that makes it p...
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DNA nanotechnology
Small nucleic acid complexes can be equipped with sticky ends and combined into larger two-dimensional periodic lattices containing a specific tessellated pattern of the individual molecular tiles. The earliest example of this used double-crossover (DX) complexes as the basic tiles, each containing four sticky ends de...
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DNA nanotechnology
Two-dimensional arrays can be made to exhibit aperiodic structures whose assembly implements a specific algorithm, exhibiting one form of DNA computing. The DX tiles can have their sticky end sequences chosen so that they act as Wang tiles, allowing them to perform computation. A DX array whose assembly encodes an XOR ...
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DNA nanotechnology
DX arrays have been made to form hollow nanotubes 4–20 nm in diameter, essentially two-dimensional lattices which curve back upon themselves. These DNA nanotubes are somewhat similar in size and shape to carbon nanotubes, and while they lack the electrical conductance of carbon nanotubes, DNA nanotubes are more easily ...
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DNA nanotechnology
Forming three-dimensional lattices of DNA was the earliest goal of DNA nanotechnology, but this proved to be one of the most difficult to realize. Success using a motif based on the concept of tensegrity, a balance between tension and compression forces, was finally reported in 2009.
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DNA nanotechnology
Discrete structures Researchers have synthesized many three-dimensional DNA complexes that each have the connectivity of a polyhedron, such as a cube or octahedron, meaning that the DNA duplexes trace the edges of a polyhedron with a DNA junction at each vertex. The earliest demonstrations of DNA polyhedra were very wo...
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DNA nanotechnology
Nanostructures of arbitrary, non-regular shapes are usually made using the DNA origami method. These structures consist of a long, natural virus strand as a "scaffold", which is made to fold into the desired shape by computationally designed short "staple" strands. This method has the advantages of being easy to desig...
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DNA nanotechnology
Templated assembly Nucleic acid structures can be made to incorporate molecules other than nucleic acids, sometimes called heteroelements, including proteins, metallic nanoparticles, quantum dots, and fullerenes. This allows the construction of materials and devices with a range of functionalities much greater than is...
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DNA nanotechnology
Dynamic DNA nanotechnology Dynamic DNA nanotechnology focuses on forming nucleic acid systems with designed dynamic functionalities related to their overall structures, such as computation and mechanical motion. There is some overlap between structural and dynamic DNA nanotechnology, as structures can be formed through...
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DNA nanotechnology
DNA complexes have been made that change their conformation upon some stimulus, making them one form of nanorobotics. These structures are initially formed in the same way as the static structures made in structural DNA nanotechnology, but are designed so that dynamic reconfiguration is possible after the initial asse...
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DNA nanotechnology
DNA walkers are a class of nucleic acid nanomachines that exhibit directional motion along a linear track. A large number of schemes have been demonstrated. One strategy is to control the motion of the walker along the track using control strands that need to be manually added in sequence. It is also possible to contro...
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DNA nanotechnology
Strand displacement cascades Cascades of strand displacement reactions can be used for either computational or structural purposes. An individual strand displacement reaction involves revealing a new sequence in response to the presence of some initiator strand. Many such reactions can be linked into a cascade where ...
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DNA nanotechnology
Strand displacement complexes can be used to make molecular logic gates capable of complex computation. Unlike traditional electronic computers, which use electric current as inputs and outputs, molecular computers use the concentrations of specific chemical species as signals. In the case of nucleic acid strand disp...
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DNA nanotechnology
Another use of strand displacement cascades is to make dynamically assembled structures. These use a hairpin structure for the reactants, so that when the input strand binds, the newly revealed sequence is on the same molecule rather than disassembling. This allows new opened hairpins to be added to a growing complex...
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DNA nanotechnology
Applications DNA nanotechnology provides one of the few ways to form designed, complex structures with precise control over nanoscale features. The field is beginning to see application to solve basic science problems in structural biology and biophysics. The earliest such application envisaged for the field, and one...
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DNA nanotechnology
DNA nanotechnology is moving toward potential real-world applications. The ability of nucleic acid arrays to arrange other molecules indicates its potential applications in molecular scale electronics. The assembly of a nucleic acid structure could be used to template the assembly of molecular electronic elements such...
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DNA nanotechnology
In a study conducted by a group of scientists from iNANO and CDNA centers in Aarhus University, researchers were able to construct a small multi-switchable 3D DNA Box Origami. The proposed nanoparticle was characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and Förster resonance energ...
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DNA nanotechnology
There are potential applications for DNA nanotechnology in nanomedicine, making use of its ability to perform computation in a biocompatible format to make "smart drugs" for targeted drug delivery, as well as for diagnostic applications. One such system being investigated uses a hollow DNA box containing proteins that...
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DNA nanotechnology
Applications for DNA nanotechnology in nanomedicine also focus on mimicking the structure and function of naturally occurring membrane proteins with designed DNA nanostructures. In 2012, Langecker et al. introduced a pore-shaped DNA origami structure that can self-insert into lipid membranes via hydrophobic cholesterol...
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DNA nanotechnology
Design DNA nanostructures must be rationally designed so that individual nucleic acid strands will assemble into the desired structures. This process usually begins with specification of a desired target structure or function. Then, the overall secondary structure of the target complex is determined, specifying the arr...
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DNA nanotechnology
Structural design The first step in designing a nucleic acid nanostructure is to decide how a given structure should be represented by a specific arrangement of nucleic acid strands. This design step determines the secondary structure, or the positions of the base pairs that hold the individual strands together in the ...
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DNA nanotechnology
Tile-based structures. This approach breaks the target structure into smaller units with strong binding between the strands contained in each unit, and weaker interactions between the units. It is often used to make periodic lattices, but can also be used to implement algorithmic self-assembly, making them a platform f...
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DNA nanotechnology
Sequence design
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DNA nanotechnology
After any of the above approaches are used to design the secondary structure of a target complex, an actual sequence of nucleotides that will form into the desired structure must be devised. Nucleic acid design is the process of assigning a specific nucleic acid base sequence to each of a structure's constituent strand...
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DNA nanotechnology
Nucleic acid design has similar goals to protein design. In both, the sequence of monomers is designed to favor the desired target structure and to disfavor other structures. Nucleic acid design has the advantage of being much computationally easier than protein design, because the simple base pairing rules are suffici...
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DNA nanotechnology
Materials and methods The sequences of the DNA strands making up a target structure are designed computationally, using molecular modeling and thermodynamic modeling software. The nucleic acids themselves are then synthesized using standard oligonucleotide synthesis methods, usually automated in an oligonucleotide synt...
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DNA nanotechnology
The fully formed target structures can be verified using native gel electrophoresis, which gives size and shape information for the nucleic acid complexes. An electrophoretic mobility shift assay can assess whether a structure incorporates all desired strands. Fluorescent labeling and Förster resonance energy transfe...
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DNA nanotechnology
Nucleic acid structures can be directly imaged by atomic force microscopy, which is well suited to extended two-dimensional structures, but less useful for discrete three-dimensional structures because of the microscope tip's interaction with the fragile nucleic acid structure; transmission electron microscopy and cryo...
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DNA nanotechnology
The conceptual foundation for DNA nanotechnology was first laid out by Nadrian Seeman in the early 1980s. Seeman's original motivation was to create a three-dimensional DNA lattice for orienting other large molecules, which would simplify their crystallographic study by eliminating the difficult process of obtaining pu...
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DNA nanotechnology
In 1991, Seeman's laboratory published a report on the synthesis of a cube made of DNA, the first synthetic three-dimensional nucleic acid nanostructure, for which he received the 1995 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology. This was followed by a DNA truncated octahedron. It soon became clear that these structures, polygonal...
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DNA nanotechnology
New abilities continued to be discovered for designed DNA structures throughout the 2000s. The first DNA nanomachine—a motif that changes its structure in response to an input—was demonstrated in 1999 by Seeman. An improved system, which was the first nucleic acid device to make use of toehold-mediated strand displac...
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DNA nanotechnology
In 2006, Rothemund first demonstrated the DNA origami method for easily and robustly forming folded DNA structures of arbitrary shape. Rothemund had conceived of this method as being conceptually intermediate between Seeman's DX lattices, which used many short strands, and William Shih's DNA octahedron, which consisted...
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DNA nanotechnology
DNA nanotechnology was initially met with some skepticism due to the unusual non-biological use of nucleic acids as materials for building structures and doing computation, and the preponderance of proof of principle experiments that extended the abilities of the field but were far from actual applications. Seeman's 19...
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DNA nanotechnology
See also International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation, and Engineering Comparison of nucleic acid simulation software Molecular models of DNA Nanobiotechnology References Further reading General: —An article written for laypeople by the founder of the field —A review of results in the period 2001–2010 ...
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DNA nanotechnology
—A review of nucleic acid nanomechanical devices —A review coming from the viewpoint of secondary structure design —A minireview specifically focusing on tile-based assembly —A review of DNA systems making use of strand displacement mechanisms External links What is Bionanotechnology?—a video introduction to DNA nan...
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Smolensk air disaster
On 10 April 2010, a Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft operating Polish Air Force Flight 101 crashed near the Russian city of Smolensk, killing all 96 people on board. Among the victims were the president of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, and his wife, Maria, the former president of Poland in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, the chief of the...
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Smolensk air disaster
The pilots were attempting to land at Smolensk North Airport—a former military airbase—in thick fog, with visibility reduced to about . The aircraft descended far below the normal approach path until it struck trees, rolled inverted and crashed into the ground, coming to rest in a wooded area a short distance from the ...
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Both the Russian and Polish official investigations found no technical faults with the aircraft, and concluded that the crew failed to conduct the approach in a safe manner in the given weather conditions. The Polish authorities found serious deficiencies in the organization and training of the Air Force unit involved,...
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Various conspiracy theories about the crash have since been in circulation, and are promoted by Law and Justice's leaders Jarosław Kaczyński (twin brother to President Lech Kaczyński) and his deputy, Antoni Macierewicz, who claim the crash was a political assassination. As of 2011, Polish and Russian investigations did...
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Purpose of the flight The flight's purpose was taking many high-ranking Polish officials to ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, a mass murder of Polish intellectuals, politicians, and military officers by the Soviets during World War II. The site of the massacre is approximately west of Smol...
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Smolensk North Airport is a former military airbase, presently in mixed military-civilian use. At the time of the crash, the airport was not equipped with an -compliant instrument landing system (ILS), the standard system used in most developed countries. The airport used to have a Russian-made landing system installed...
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The ground visual navigation aids on 10 April 2010 were not effective. According to the Polish report, the radar was unstable and swung within ±10%. From the photographic documentation of the Polish committee, it appears that the origin of components of the Smolensk North lighting system was unknown. This was not the L...
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Aircraft
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Smolensk air disaster
The aircraft was a Tupolev Tu-154M of the 36th Special Aviation Regiment of the Polish Air Force (Siły Powietrzne), tail number 101. Built in 1990 at the Kuybyshev Aviation Plant as msn 90A837, it first flew on 29 June 1990. At the time of the accident, the airframe had accumulated more than 5,150 hours in 4,000 cycles...
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101 was one of two Tupolev Tu-154s that served as official government jets; the other with a tail number of 102 was a year younger and at the time of the accident it was being overhauled in the Aviakor aviation plant in Samara, Russia. The 101 aircraft had undergone a major overhaul in December 2009, and Alexey Gusev, ...
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The aircraft used the callsign Polish Airforce 101 operating flight PLF101. PLF is the ICAO three-letter designator for the Polish Air Force used to identify the operator of an aircraft by air traffic control.
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Crew The cockpit crew of Flight 101 consisted of pilot Captain Arkadiusz Protasiuk, co-pilot Major Robert Grzywna, navigator Lieutenant Artur Ziętek and flight engineer WO2 Andrzej Michalak. Protasiuk had landed at Smolensk three days earlier on 7 April in the same Tu-154; he served as first officer on that flight. P...
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Smolensk air disaster
Flight sequence Take-off and cruise Flight PLF101 took off from Warsaw at 9:27 Smolensk time after a delay of 27 minutes.
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Smolensk air disaster
As the aircraft left Warsaw, weather conditions were rapidly deteriorating at Smolensk. A temperature inversion had developed, trapping moisture low in the atmosphere and causing a dense fog to develop. At 9:15 Smolensk time, about an hour and a half before the crash, a Yakovlev Yak-40 jet (flight PLF 031) also belongi...
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Stress and workload factors Meanwhile, the situation in the cockpit was one of very high stress. As the weather continued to worsen, the crew became increasingly aware of the extreme difficulty they would encounter in landing at Smolensk. The crew may have feared a negative reaction from their passengers should they ha...
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The captain and first officer's decision making may have also been affected by knowledge of a 2008 flight when the President of Poland ordered a change in destination right before departure and again while airborne. The captain and first officer had been the first officer and navigator, respectively, on that flight. La...
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Smolensk air disaster
Complicating the situation was the increased workload on the captain. Normally, one pilot flies the airplane while another crew member handles radio communications. On Flight 101, the responsibility for communication usually rests with the navigator. At Smolensk however the situation was different. As the airport is no...
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Smolensk air disaster
Approach
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Smolensk air disaster
Under these stresses, the crew continued their approach pattern and readied the aircraft for final descent. Radios were tuned to the two Non-Directional Beacons (NDBs) present at the field, and the autopilot was set up to use waypoints from the Flight Management System (FMS) units for navigation. The crew used their se...
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Smolensk air disaster
The Terrain Awareness Warning System (TAWS) fired its first audible warning "terrain ahead!" at 10:40:06. This was because the Smolensk airport, as a former military airfield not open to international flights, was not in the system's database and therefore the system did not recognize that the airplane was approaching ...
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Approaching , the navigator began calling out the radar altimeter's reading. This is not standard practice for a non-precision approach, as the radar altimeter does not take into account the contour of the terrain around the airport. Standard practice would entail calling out the readings on the pressure altimeter, whi...
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Warning signs At , the engines were still at idle power. Power settings for jet engines are expressed in instrument readings and flight data recorders as percentages labeled as "N1" and "N2". N1 and N2 refer to the spools, or shafts, of a jet engine on which the compressor and turbine blades are mounted; jet engine pow...
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At , the "terrain ahead!" warning again sounded on the flight deck. The crew continued the descent. According to MAK's report, at (Decision Height) there was no "landing" or "go-around" call by the captain. If this happens, the first officer is supposed to overrule the captain, take control of the airplane, and initia...
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For the next several seconds, the crew continued to call out "100 meters" as read from the radar altimeter. The aircraft was flying into a valley at this time and actually descended by . The crew began calling out radar altitude every . At radar altitude (where the crew had set their radar altitude bugs), the First Of...
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Point of no return As the crew called out "50 meters", the controller instructed "level 101", telling the aircraft to terminate descent. At , another controller instructed "Check altitude, level." Simultaneously with this final call, the control column was pulled full aft, commanding max pitch up from the aircraft, and...
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Soon after, the aircraft began hitting trees. One, a large birch with a trunk wide, ripped off about of the left wing, including the left aileron. The resulting asymmetrical lift caused an uncommanded roll to the left. Within 5 seconds, the aircraft was inverted, hitting the ground with the left wing, followed very s...
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After the nose hit, the aircraft was violently torn apart by impact forces. The wreckage came to rest upside-down about before the runway threshold and slightly left of its centreline. The largest pieces left were the wing roots (the strongest part of an airplane), the wingtips and the tail section. The tail section c...
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The governor of Smolensk Oblast, Sergey Antufyev, confirmed that there were no survivors of the crash. Pictures from the scene showed parts of the aircraft charred and strewn through a wooded area. The Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, said that the bodies of those killed in the crash would be brought to Moscow f...
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Investigation As the accident occurred on Russian soil, Russia was tasked by ICAO procedure with primary responsibility for investigation, which it carried out with international cooperation. Poland also set up its own committee to investigate the crash, and prosecutors in both countries began criminal investigations. ...
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Immediate actions Within hours of the crash, the president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, announced the establishment of a special commission for the investigation of the accident. The commission was to be supervised by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. An Investigation Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia started a...
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Flight recorders Two flight recorders, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR), were recovered undamaged from the crash site during the afternoon/early evening of 10 April, as was confirmed by Sergey Shoygu, the Russian minister of emergency situations. That evening, it was reported that the...
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On the day after the crash, investigators said they had reviewed the flight recorders, and confirmed that there were no technical problems with the Soviet-built aeroplane, ruling out initial theories that the 20-year-old aircraft was at fault. Alexei Gusev, general director of the Aviakor factory, said that the aircraf...
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Search for human remains Ewa Kopacz, former Polish Minister of Health, claimed before the Sejm that after the crash, ground was dug to a depth of one metre, and even if a tiny piece of human flesh was found, it was genetically tested. However, in the transcript released online by the Sejm, the meaning of her speech was...
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Russian cooperation Russia offered full cooperation to Polish prosecutors during the investigation. According to the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) Polish investigators in Russia have been given access to all procedures of Russian investigators. However, Edmund Klich, the head of the Polish investigative commissio...
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Airport and pilot communication The airport's traffic control communicated with the pilots in Russian, and one of the controllers claimed the Polish crew had problems communicating in this language. However, according to Tomasz Pietrzak, the former commander of the Polish 36th Special Aviation Regiment, the captain of ...
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Smolensk air disaster
The airport, which normally should have been closed due to the severe conditions, was not declared closed as its management feared that this could cause a diplomatic incident. According to the news agency Interfax, the pilot was told that Smolensk North Airport was enveloped in thick fog and strongly advised against la...
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Smolensk air disaster
There was some concern in the press as to whether or not Russian military ATC had the authority to issue military orders to Flight 101, as the aircraft was a military flight. Under Russian law, military flights are under the control of Russian military ATC, and permission or denial for approach and landing must be give...
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Smolensk air disaster
Theft from victims On 6 June 2010, it was reported that payments worth €1,400 had been made from a credit card found on the body of historian Andrzej Przewoźnik, one of the victims of the crash. Credit cards belonging to the politician Aleksandra Natalli-Świat were also missing, but not used in transactions. On 8 June ...
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