Thread by @akoz33

Mark Solonin has now posted another (and he claims last) video about the Smolensk air disaster, or more exactly his analysis and response to the debate between him and two Polish experts: Mark Artymowicz, who is a physics professor at the University of Toronto and

https://twitter.com/akoz33/status/1406003928039399427

Marek Ciszewski, a retired Polish airforce colonel and fighter jet pilot. I now really also wish to stop wring about this subject, as the debate has become very bad tempered and the mutual attitudes of both sides and their supporters very hostile.

A large part of the discussion now consists of exchanges of insults. This is, of course, what always happens when politics invades any area, however “politically neutral” it seems. Mark Solonin called his first video a “technicum” - the intend was to concentrate entirely on

the technical aspects of the accident, leaving politics aside or leaving it to better informed (at least about Polish politics) guests on his program, but soon it became impossible.

Of course, the very claim that lies behind Solonin’s series of videos, that is, that Russia i.e. Putin deliberately assassinated Poland’s president and much of the political, military and cultural elite is “political”.

Nevertheless, the question of whether the crash itself can be explained only as caused by explosions of bombs (there would have to be more than one) on board or by other means, should, in principle, be possible to discuss at the purely technical level.

But this would be so in an ideal world - in our world it turns out to be impossible. It seems everyone who tries to express a public view on this issue will be personally attacked by one side or the other. If he is lucky, it will be only for incompetence.

As I wrote before, Yulia Latynina was the first person who entered this argument, after being urged to do so by her readers and viewers.

Politically, she is on the same side as Mark Solonin, but although she agreed that Russia bears the main responsibility for the crash, she found the bomb theory unconvincing.

Even if the crash happened “naturally” it required the combination of many factors to cause it. I will say more about it later, but here is just one. The plane was attempting to lang in dense fog.

It was lost and flying in the wrong direction, into a forest instead of the landing strip. The Russians ground controllers could not see a thing. Their equipment was not working.

The lights that are suppose to point to the landing strip where either not working or (according to those who believe that the crash was deliberately caused) were guiding the plane into the forest.

Yet the Russian traffic controllers were telling the pilots that they were in the right position and gliding towards the landing strip. Had they just told the truth: “ we can’t see a thing, have no idea where you are, our equipment isn’t working.

You are on your own…” the chances a crash would have declined by 99%.
And, of course, the official Russian report was written to cover up Russia’s culpability and to blame the Polish crew and even the President

(this, as Solonin points out, started to be done by Russian official media even before anything was known about the crash and even before the black boxes where found).

This is part Latynina and Solonin agreed on, but because she would not accept the bomb theory (she wrote a long article in Novaya Gazeta and made two YouTube videos) she was very crudely attacked by some of Solonin’s

supporters (which lead her to conclude that the political spectrum is always circular). Latynina also tried to address the technical issues and in my opinion did it rather well (I will come to this later).

She was helped by three friends, one a distinguished aviation expert and two pilots. There is one interesting point though: she says she asked several physicists for help but they all said they “would have to think about it”. This was, in my opinion, the right answer.

Not only does it seem very difficult to model what actually happened, but the vary basic “facts” claimed as given by one side, are denied by the other.

Because of the lack of genuine independent investigation of the crash it is impossible to be sure which of these claims are well grounded.

I am a mathematician and have never had anything to do with physics or engineering. I have had some interest in physics but more in quantum mechanics that in the kind of classical Newtonian mechanics that both sides apply here.

In my view both sides, Solonin on the one hand and Artymowicza and Ciszewski on the other, have successfully managed to undermine the claims of the other but not to establish their own. Let me mention a few examples.

Solonin’s main argument for the bombs theory is based on the disintegration of the plane and also of the bodies of the passengers, something that happens extremely rarely.

To support his claim that such a thing could not happen Solonin described the body of the plane as being a uniformly solid and tough construction, that without fire (which is agreed did not occur in this case) would protect at least some of the passengers.

However, the opponents of this view (Latynina as well as Artymowicz and Ciszewski) claim that the roof of a plane is its weak point and that after having a part of a wing sliced of by a birch tree, the plane turned around and hit the ground with its weak roof.

But Solonin denies that this could have happened at all, and that the plane in fact hit the ground with the roof. He claims that the plane was so low when it allegedly collided with the birch tree (he denies completely that the birch tree had anything to do with the crash)

it was so low that it could not have turned around without hitting the ground with its remaining wing.

To explain the state of the bodies of the crash victims the Russian MAK commission claimed that the crash caused the acceleration on the bodies of the victims of the magnitude of 100g (1 g is the acceleration due to gravity, about 9.81 meters per second squared).

Solonin ridiculed this claim and produced his own calculation getting the result of only a few g. But as Artymowicz pointed out, Solonin’s calculation was only the average acceleration over the last stage of the flight.

Latynina pointed out the same thing and she, in my opinion correctly, pointed out that no such calculation is possible and the only way to know what the acceleration acting on the bodies could have been known was to have had a special measuring device installed

(as is done in racing cars). But Artymowicz gave his own calculation, which seems to be just as wrong as Solonin’s but in a different way, and which made Solonin expressed a doubt that Artymoiwicz could possible be a physics professor at the University of Toronto.

What Artymowicz did was this. He took estimated cross sectional area of the plane, multiplied it be a “plasticity factor” of the ground, which he claimed was the force acting on the plane. Then he divided it by the mass of the plane, and got about 100g.

This was, according to him, the acceleration of the plane, and then he asserted that American studies showed that the acceleration acting on the bodies of the passengers would be about 2/3 of this.

But since only the vertical component of the force was taken into account and there was still an unknown horizontal component, the actual acceleration on the bodies could have been around 100 g.

One of the viewers observed that Artymowicz’s calculation could not be right because it did not take into account the velocity of the plane, which was according to the record, vertical

(the pilots having realised that the plane was about to crash were trying to lift out of danger). I also think the velocity has to matter. Solonin’s own calculation was based on the velocity - he basically used the law of conservation of energy -

the kinetic energy of the plane is equal to the work done by the first acting on the plane, well roughly of course, because energy will be lost in other ways.

Solonin also pointed out that what matters is not only the magnitude of the acceleration but also its duration (he showed this by referring to a book by a leading Soviet expert who played an important role in the Soviet space program).

Even a huge acceleration of 100G will do no damage to the human body (unlike to glass) if it acts for only a very short time, which is why these instant measurements of acceleration are not a useful guide to human survival. In any case,

one of Solonin’s main points is that the plane could not have hit the ground in the manner described because it was moving upwards.

Latynina also agreed with that, but she pointed out that it was flying in a ravine, and although it it was moving up, it was not moving up enough as the ground level was raising faster.

But in that case the crash would not have been of the kind described by Artymowicz (who has written a lot on this subject). In fact, Solonin returned again to what he said earlier.

He showed an illustration of how the crash took place due to Artymowicz, and pointed out, it seems to me correctly, that if the crash took place the way Artymowicz drew it, there would have been a crater of at least the size of a couple of trucks yet nobody has found any crater.

Solonin also dismissed with visible contempt the argument of Ciszewski involving chaotic motion (which rather impressed me, I must say, though perhaps because mathematicians tend to like such tings).

Ciszewski claimed that after the plane lost a part of its wing, it became subject to rapidly changing centrifugal forces which caused its motion to become chaotic - that was supposed to be the explanation which the bits of bodies of the passengers where distributed randomly -

out of order. Solonin did some calculations which seemed to show that for an object of the size of a Tupolev, the angular velocity needed for this to occur would not have been possible to achieve.

O.K. so I have to say now that I really have no idea what to think. There are just too many unknowns. It seems to me pretty clear that Latynina was right that there the parameters needed for these kind of calculations are simply not known.

Like in other cases of this kind one comes to the conclusion that no final answer will be known with any confidence until a full and independent investigation takes place. But this will not happen at least as long as Putin is in the Kremlin and perhaps even longer.

Of course, as usual these days, the fact that there is just not enough information to make up one’s mind will not stop many people claiming that they know exactly what happened and that all who disagree with them are either stupid or acting in bad faith.