Poland celebrates hero pilot

WARSAW--The captain of a Polish jetliner who managed to safely belly-land his plane after its landing gear failed was lauded as a hero Wednesday, helping redeem the reputation of Polish aviators in the wake of last year's crash that killed the country's president and other leaders.

Veteran 54-year-old flier Tadeusz Wrona gently brought his Boeing 767 down, sliding its fuselage along a flame-retardant-coated runway on Tuesday after its hydraulics malfunctioned on a flight from Newark. None of the 231 people on board was injured.

"When the plane stopped, I wasn't sure if everyone was safe. There was smoke," Wrona said at a news conference on Wednesday. "I felt huge relief when the purser reported, a minute and a half after we stopped, that the cabin was empty."

The pilot--who has logged about 15,000 hours in the air for Poland's flag carrier, LOT--said he had a hard time falling asleep Tuesday night and kept replaying the landing in his head. He insisted he shouldn't be viewed as a hero. "Each of us at LOT would have done it the same way," he said.

Still, Poles were jubilant about Wrona's feat, an emotional response heightened by memories of the 2010 crash of a Polish air-force plane in Russia that killed then-President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, plunging the nation into mourning and roiling politics.

Polish authorities put much of the blame for the accident, which occurred during an attempted landing in heavy fog, on lapses in training for military pilots.

Wrona's surname means "crow" in Polish. And online fans started Facebook pages with the slogan: "Fly like an eagle, land like a crow." Tens of thousands of people have "liked" profiles of Wrona set up by admirers on the U.S. social- media site.

Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, elected after his predecessor's death, commended Wrona on Tuesday, saying his actions showed that "in emergency situations, Poland proves itself." He said he intended to award Wrona a national decoration.

Poland has long been proud of its aviation heritage. Polish pilots won admiration for their part in the Battle of Britain, the epic air conflict over the U.K. in World War II. A 97-year-old former Polish airman, believed to be the last surviving veteran of that fight, died earlier this month.

Officials from Boeing arrived in Poland to help investigate the causes of the hydraulic failure. The crew made repeated efforts to deploy the landing gear, even trying a steep ascent to see if gravity would help pull the wheels down, before making the emergency landing.

On Wednesday, Wrona said he is set to fly another LOT 767 to Hanoi, Vietnam, on Saturday. He said he hopes his schedule isn't changed because of the inquiry into the emergency landing. "I'd quite like to fly there," he said.