Yulia Latynina has now produced the second part of her very extensive and detailed analysis of the Smolensk air crash in response to Mark Solonin’s three youtube videos and it’s an enormously impressive work.
It is amazing that anyone could do so much research in such a short time (I intended to try something similar but gave myself until the beginning of next academic year - that is, until October to do it).
But I have to admit that she has essentially convinced me and I no longer feel compelled to try to do so. It’s incredible that someone who is a “just a philologist” (as she keeps describing herself) could do so much highly technical work, in which actually she seems
to have managed to uncover some serious mistakes made by Mark Solonin, a professional aviation engineer.
Of course, she had some very fine professional help: the famous Aeroflot pilot Andrei Litvinov, Andrei Ermishin, former MIG pilot and instructor and Vadim Lukashevich, a famous aviation expert.
I cannot try to repeat here the all the arguments. Those who understand Russian should listen to the really fascinating Latynina’s second talk here (the first one is also very much worth listening to).
Even if you don’t understand Russian, you can have a look at the somewhat shorter written version in Novaya Gazeta, which has many pictures
(unfortunately I doubt that Goole Translate will be very useful. There is a great deal of technical language here and in any case Latynina’s Russian is very idiomatic and Google Translate often makes a hash of it).
So here let me address only the main points. The first thing Latynina did in her first talk, and it is very significant, was to completely demolish the official Russian MAK report on the catastrophe.
The main purpose of the MAK report was to cover up the extreme negligence and incompetence of the Russian air controls and the incredibly bad state of the airport, and, of course, the fact that the
Russian authorities did not make even a tiny fraction of the effort to deal with these problems than they would have made if even a fairly minor Russian official was flying to the airport instead of Poland’s president.
Just a couple of examples: the Russian side passed the airport coordinates to the Poles in an older coordinate system from the one that it used now and which the Poles expected, without informing them of this let alone providing any converter.
And when the plane was attempting to land, in a cloud and in a completely wrong place, the Russian dispatcher kept telling the pilots that they are correctly positioned on on the glide path.
In fact, numerous such facts were described in the remarks on the original MAK report sent by Polish investigators.
In order to better cover things up, they tried to slander as much as possible the Polish crew, the commander of Poland’s Air Force general Andrzej Błasik (“drunk general”),
and even the late Lech Kaczyński. Some of these allegations, found originally in the MAK report, for which there is no basis, have been taken up by some Polish opponents of Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party.
The main purpose of the MAK report was to cover up the incompetence and negligence of the Russian side and shift the blame to the Poles.
The MAK report also does not contain a step by step analysis of the flight based on information from black boxes. This is contained only in the Polish Miller report and it is this that Latynina bases her analysis on.
Two of these black boxes, one of Polish and one American make, were returned to Poland and decoded only by the Poles. The MAK report did not make use of them, and surprisingly, neither did Mark Solonin.
Latynina’s analysis, to my mind, convincingly deals with all the issues and questions raised by Solonin, even at highly technical levels.
In such extraordinary cases, one always needs to adopt the famous principle of Sherlock Holmes: “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth.”
It is exactly the principle Mark Solonin tried to follow - if you show that the crash could not have happened due to negligence, incompetence, ill will and bad luck than the only possibility left is Pertrov and Bashirov.
But how do you “eliminate the impossible”. Even science is often not sufficient.
According to Latynina and her advisors, Solonin makes several mistakes.
According to Latynina and her advisors, Solonin makes several mistakes.
The first one is to simply ignore the Polish black boxes, without even trying to justify why they should be ignored (were they falsified?). The second is purely technical. Solonin overstates the strength and indestructibility of a modern airplane.
Solonin describes the modern plane as if it were a rocket - a powerful, almost indestructible steel tube.If a plane was constructed in this way, it would not matter how it hit the ground. Lukashevich says: such a plane can be constructed but it could not fly,it would be to heavy.
In a real plane the roof is the vulnerable part - its much weaker than the rest. And Kaczyński’s plane hit the ground in an upside down position.
The same applies to the wing.
The same applies to the wing.
Ermishin says: aviation engineers often don’t understand exactly the construction of an aircraft wing. In reality only party of a wing is how Solonin described - that part indeed could not be sliced away by any tree.
But the tip of a wing is not like that and what happens in a crash with a tree depends on the angle of attack. There are indeed known and documented cases of that part of a wing being cut off in a collision with a tree.
The condition of the bodies was one of the main arguments of Solonin - but Latynina says his description is incorrect.
The bodies from whom all clothing was torn off and which were crashed to pieces where those of passengers who did not have seat belts on - it did not happen to the others, seat belts would probably not have much difference in the case of an explosion.
And the notorious claim that a force of 100g acted on the passengers and caused this the destruction of the bodies - which Solonin said was impossible in the case of such a powerful construction as an airplane.
Well, here the situation is curious. The number 100g is mentioned only in the MAK report and does not occur in any reports on any aircrash. Latynina says, and seems to be right, that this number was totally made up by MAK, and has no relation to reality.
In fact, no such estimate can be given (Solonin uses a simple calculation but it is actually rather obviously wrong). Solonin correctly seized on an absurd claim in MAK but the claim is irrelevant.
Latynina points out that the race car driver Kenny Bräk (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Brä… ) in 2003 survived a crash in which they highest g-forces ever (214g) were recorded by specially installed equipment. 
This was due to the very high level of protection available to a racing car driver, so only as small proportion of these g-force was not absorbed by the protective equipment. None of this applies to the case of an air-crash.
Summing up, I think Latynina has done a remarkable job and she has at least succeeded in changing my mind again.
Not 100% but within the margin of reasonable doubt (which of course means that new evidence or new arguments may still cause me to change my mind again). Finally, this is how she ends her talk:
“Putin has committed so many crimes, that one should talk about them. One should talk about his palace, about the poisoning of Navalny, and one should not create fakes and invent our own dispatch controller Carlos. Freedom to Navalny. All the best.
If Mark wants to debate this with me, I will gladly accept because it is a great honor for me. Mark is one of the best Russian historians of WWII. All of us have our own quirks, I certainly too.
This is Yulia Latynia, don’t for get to like and share this video if you liked it, we worked really hard on it.
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