Thread by @akoz33

The day before yesterday there was on Ekho Moskvy the much awaited confrontation between the historian (and aviation engineer) Mark Solonin and two Poles, the astrophysicist Paweł Artymowicz and retired military airforce pilot Marek Ciszewski, on the subject of the 2010 crash

killed Poland's president Lech Kaczyński and a great many members political, military and cultural elite (mostly from the political right). Let me remind you that Mark Solonin recored several videos in which he supported the analysis of an anonymous Russian or group of Russians

published on the Internet under the pseudonym Flanker20 and also a second Polish report of the so called Macierewicz Commission (this report, by the way, was supported by @20committee , see the article

observer.com/2018/05/eviden…
and also by the British air crash examiner Frank Taylor (mentioned in Schindler's article). Both Schindler and Taylor have since been hardly attacked in the anti-PIS Polish media (which includes most of the private ones).

Macierewicz, Schindler, Taylor and Solonin as well as the Flanker20 report (which was first publicised by Andrei Lillarionov) all claim that the crash was caused by a bomb, and they strongly hint that Russia was responsible. This theory is fiercely rejected by all the anti-PiS

forces in Poland (and even by some PiS supporters). Although few dispute some degree Russia's culpability (it would be hard not to given Russia's behaviour which bears a lot of resemblance to China's in relation to the origins of the Wuhan virus) the issue has become very

political in Poland, with most people's minds made up on purely political grounds and few willing to listen to any technical analysis.
Mark Solonin's intervention in the dispute has created a big stir due to the high regard in which he is held as a historian, his success in

identifying correctly the cause of another crash of a Russian plane, which was originally denied and for which he was ridiculed (it involved the crash of a Russian plane over Sinai, which Russia originally attributed to a technical problem and Solonin proved to have been due to

terrorism, a conclusion which was soon confirmed by Putin.
Mark Solonin originally tried to keep the arguments purely technical, which proved impossible, although I don't think he could be blamed for it. He then challenged aviation experts who supported the accident view to a

debate.
The debate was joined by Yulia Latynina, (@YLatynina ) the brilliant Russian writer, journalist and polymath, who, as she said herself, was very reluctant to enter it (due to not being an expert but also her often stated admiration for Mark Solonin's work in uncovering

the falsehoods in the Soviet (and also Western ) view on the Stalin-Hitler relations from 1939-41, Stalin's plans and the catastrophic Soviet defeats in 1941 (Solonin largely agrees with the views of Victor Suvorov, although he differed form him in important respects. During the

brief period when this was possible he uncovered a number of unique Soviet archival documents, including maps with war plans with writings in the hand of Zhukov, Vassilevsky and others. These are mentioned in the books of Kotkin and the recent one of McMeekin "Stalin's War").

Latynina was induced by questions from regular listeners to her political commentaries to comment on Solonin's claims. She then began to be seriously involved in this, did a huge amount of work, with the help of two pilots and one well known aviation experts, wrote a long and

detailed article in Novaya Gazeta and pushed two even longer YouTube videos. While she agreed with Solonin that Russia's original report (the so called MAK) report was a pack of lies, she essentially agreed with the Polish Miller report (produced under the Tusk government) and

and accused Macierewicz of a number of falsifications. She also provided quite detailed technical answers to the points raised by Solonin and offered to debate him, but Mark politely rejected this offer on the grounds that Latynina, a doctor of philology, was not qualified to

accept his challenge. Instead the challenge was accepted by two Polish experts: Artymowicz, who is a well known physicist in Canada and Ciszewski. There was a touch of spice added to the debate by the fact that while Artymowicz and Solonin were clearly coldly antagonistic,

Ciszewski declared himself a great admirer of Solonin's historical work and to prove it brought several of Solonin's books translated into Polish. Both Artymowicz and Ciszewski turned ou too speak excellent Russian, which used to be the case with the older generation of Poles but

is rare today.
As for me, I used to be very sceptical of the deliberate assassination theory on general grounds and then Mark Solonin almost convinced me to radically change my views. I was swayed again into by Yulia Latynina, but after thinking over some technical matters

(having spend some time imagining what the physics of a airplane crash could be - a subject that seems to me to grow in complexity the more I thought about) I essentially arrived at full agnosticism.

After listening to this debate I concluded that it was basically a tactical draw but a strategic defeat for Solonin - as far as I am concerned. In terms o impact on others, it could be very different as Solonin's videos gained more than a million views in a short time, far more

than Latynina's and this Ekho debate.
My view of the debate was first of all, that Ciszewski was much more formidable opponent for Solonin that the academic academic Artymowicz, who appears arrogant without really doing enough to justify it. Ciszewski was the only one who genui

tried to convince Solonin, which Artymowicz was more concerned in discrediting his knowledge of physics.
In the end, however, it all all reduced to ... mathematics. New the very end Ciszewski asked Solonin directly to list the main points that made him believe in the explosion

theory. Solonin listed three: the complete break up of the airplane into thousands of pieces, something that he claimed to unprecedented in the history of aviation accidents and could only be caused by a bomb, the state and position of the bodies of the victims, which were mostly

torn to shreds and thrown about in a random way, not corresponding to the direction of crash. All of the was in clear contradiction with Solonin's computations (based essentially high school dynamics, as he himself described it). The final element was a claim that traces of

chemicals indicated the presence of explosives were found on the bodies.
Ciszewski then answered the first two points by assuring that in this type of crash (very rare), when the plane totally disintegrated, the usual "high school" Newtonian dynamics does not apply and instead

the whole thing, the plane as well as the bodies of passengers, are governed by chaotic dynamics, which results in a totally unpredictable distribution of the body fragments, completely different and "out of order" from what one would expect in an "ordinary crash". As for the

chemicals supposedly fond on the bodies, both Ciszewskia and Artymowicz declared it one of the lies produced by Macierewicz.
Well, what do I think of this? The presence of non-linear dynamics and chaos seems quite convincing to me, and it seems to be also essentially what

Latynina meant when she talked of the impact as a "wave" travelling through the plane. I tried to think myself how such a thing could occur and even started to reread the only book I have read on chaos and non-linear dynamics in my mathematical career (a long time ago)

But, of course, this is not very helpful for air crashes. While chaos does produce a reasonable theoretical explanation, it would be almost impossible to confirm it experimentally and indeed crash in which the body of an aircraft totally disintegrates are very rare without a bomb

being involved. I don't think therefore the Artymowicz and Ciszewski have actually decisively disproved any of Solonin's arguments - they, or rather Ciszewski, produce only a reasonable alternative. The question is on whom is now the burden of proof and different people will see

it differently.
I have to add that, in spite of some similarities (due mostly to the similarities between China and Russia as well as the politicisation of both American and Polish academia), I see the situation with the "origin of coronavirus" issue and the "cause of the

Smolensk crash" as very different. As for the coronavirus, my own Baysian estimate of the lab created vs natural hypothesis is something like 98% vs 2%. Sure, purely biological grounds everything is possible, Natura is capable to do the most unlikely things, but on

"criminological grounds" (which include such things that a supposedly bat derived virus, appeared in a place which is a thousand kilometres from the nearest bats, but next to a lab where very similar bat viruses where kept, that this bat derived virus has great difficulty in

infecting bats but no problem with humans or ordinary mice (we know that they were infecting "humanised mice" with bat viruses in Wuhan) and lots more, make me confident that there is a better case for O.J. Simpson's innocence that for the theory of natural emergence of covid-19

from an intermediate animal of which no-one can find a trace.
In the Smolensk case the balance is much finer. Both a bomb and a very special kind of crash, which result in chaotic non-linear oscillations are almost indistinushable. Flanker2 and Solonin have produced an

plausible account of an bomb (and assassination) based explanation but Occam's razor favours the natural disaster assisted by negligence and incompetence (mostly on the Russian side) view.
At least that is my new right now although it still could change.