About 14 and a half minutes before the plane crash in April that killed Poland's president and many of its top officials, the pilot delivered bad news to the president's chief of diplomatic protocol: The fog was so thick that they could not safely land. But then the pilot, Arkadiusz Protasiuk, offered to try landing once, while warning that 'most likely, nothing will come of it.' The chief of protocol retreated to the cabin and returned four minutes later. 'At the moment there is no decision from the president about what to do next,' he said, according to a transcript released Tuesday of a recording of the final minutes in the cockpit. Protasiuk then tried to land, descending into a wooded area about a half-mile from the runway apparently with confidence, ignoring warnings from an on-board alarm system. The cockpit was calm until the moment the plane hit a tree and flipped over. The last words on the recording are screamed obscenities. In releasing the 41-page transcript, the Polish government hoped to quiet persistent speculation about what had prompted the disastrous landing attempt. The document offers no evidence that President Lech Kaczynski pressured the pilot because he was late for an important ceremony, a theory that circulated widely after the disaster. It also leaves no question that the pilot was aware of the thick fog, a subject that dominated conversation in the cockpit for the 20 minutes before the crash. 'It's going to be dreadful, we won't be able to see anything,' a crew member said at one point. Protasiuk was more hopeful. 'Well, no, you can see the ground,' he said, six minutes later. 'You can see something. Maybe there won't be a tragedy.' The transcript shows that Protasiuk continued to descend from a safe altitude of about 650 feet for more than a minute while the plane's Terrain Awareness and Warning System delivered the English commands 'pull up, pull up' and 'terrain ahead.' The crew members did not remark on the alarm and gave no indication that they knew they were over a forest rather than the runway. They may have had reason to ignore it, because the system's manufacturer, United Avionics, warns that most Russian airports are not in its database, so the device may give 'nuisance alerts.' The Tupolev Tu-154's left wing snagged on a birch tree, flipping the aircraft over and sending it hurtling to the ground, aviation authorities said last month. All 96 people aboard died, among them Poland's top military commanders, its first lady, the head of its central bank and dozens of other top officials. The delegation was already 90 minutes behind schedule to attend a ceremony in the nearby Katyn Forest, according to the Interstate Aviation Committee, which oversees aviation in the region. The cockpit recording shows that Russian air traffic controllers told the pilot, 'There are no conditions for landing.' Protasiuk thanked them and said, 'We'll make an attempt, but if the weather isn't good, we'll leave for a second round.' About seven minutes before the crash, controllers told the pilot to reascend from an elevation of 325 feet, and he answered, 'If we fail to land, we are reascending on autopilot.' About two minutes later, an unidentified voice is heard saying someone 'will be annoyed,' but most of the fragment is unintelligible. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the late president's brother, opposed the transcript's release, saying that the victims' families should be the first to hear the recording. Kaczynski, an opposition candidate in the coming presidential elections, boycotted the meeting on Tuesday of Poland's National Security Council, where the recordings were first presented. 