The Polish right wing party PIS has been governing the country for some years now and the commission for reinvestigating the Smolensk plane crash in 2010 has finally given an intermediate report of 64 pages:
http://www.smolenskcrashnews.com/pdf/2018-technical-report.pdf
Polish mass media, notably the television station TVN, has already declared that the report presents no new findings and always when they discuss this topic, which is too often, they interview experts, who assure that there is no evidence of any explosion whatsoever, the Committee doing in this restudy is totally incompetent, and besides PIS is such an evil party. In the last poll the support for PIS fell under 30%. I am sure that the large majority of the Polish population believes that there was no explosion and that this report was just ordered by Antoni Macierewicz and there is nothing in it.
It makes a lot of sense. Weather was bad and visibility very poor. The pilot decided to try landing and then the plane hit a large birch, lost a wing, flipped upside down and hit the ground. All passengers and the crew died. Sad incidence, but such things happen.
Only that it may not be quite like that. I did read this report and one strong piece of evidence of an explosion is all that is needed. If one tries to prove a conspiracy, false flag or foul play, there no sense in trying to present all possible evidence as a support of the theory. If everything is considered the proof is bound to be too long to follow and it will justify some arguments by weak reasoning that can be called into discussion. Even if all evidence fits to the offered explanation, the theory becomes too complicated to be accepted. It is simply so, like in mathematics, that a proof must be as short as possible and use as few arguments as possible. The arguments that are used must be undeniable. If the explanation is correct, no additional evidence can show it wrong, because there is only one way things really happened.
In this Smolensk case there is one strong piece of evidence.
It is the passenger door. I do not know why the report saves it to the end. That is the critical piece of evidence that cannot be explained away.
There is a photo showing Russians digging a passenger door of the airplane up from the ground. It was found buried one meter deep in the ground close to the ground crash site.
What pushed it so deep into the ground?
It is not pushed forward to the direction where the plane was going, which would have pushed the ground away from one side of the door. This door was pushed into the ground from above, from up to down, like if it fell from the plane. Only that dropping a 77 kg door from 6 meters will not push it one meter into the ground. It was no quicksand but normal forest ground.
The plane’s trajectory can be estimated by the ground crash site, traces of the wing and the tail stabilizer and tree damage and it is established in the report quite well that the plane was about 6 m above the ground at the place when the door fell to the ground. The horizontal velocity of the plane was 75 m/s, but the force pushing the door to the ground must come from its vertical velocity towards the ground when it hits it. The plane was at this time losing altitude and moving 12 m/s in the vertical direction. The door had the initial vertical velocity v0 =12 m/s towards the ground. The fall of 6 m with the initial velocity v0 takes 0.425 s, thus the door hits the ground with the speed 16 m/s. This is not enough for it to go one meter into the ground. You can try dropping a metal door from 13 m. When it hits the ground it has the velocity 16 m/s and most certainly will not sink one meter deep. According to the report the door must have had velocity 125 m/s. The only way for the door to get such a velocity is that it was thrown from the plane by an explosion inside the passenger part of the fuselage. This means that the plane exploded when it was 6 m above the ground.
Additional evidence cannot be in contradiction with a conclusion logically derived from strong evidence, and it is not. If there was an explosion in the passenger section, we would expect that many bodies, chairs and what there was, are fractured to several parts and the report claims that this is so. The report also claims that the Polish Police Laboratory found traces of explosives from several chair pieces. We would also expect that the plane disintegrated into many small pieces and also this seems to be the case. We would also expect that the metal pieces of the plane are bent outwards. The report produces many such photos. I cannot say if these additional pieces of evidence are true or not. I can only say that there is no obvious contradiction from them. They are not needed: there is the photo of the door deep in the ground. One strong piece of evidence is quite enough.
The next question is whether this explosion was due to fuel or explosives. Fuel in a Tupolev Tu-154M is in the wings. If the center of the explosion was in the wings, we would not expect that the door, which at this time was pointing towards the ground, would be thrown outwards and to the ground. Additionally we know that the fuel did not explode. The tanks were almost empty and a fuel explosion causes a major fire. While there were fires and the report notes that there are burned pieces, the wreck is not charred in a major way.
Is there anything inside the passenger part of a plane that can explode? There are oxygen tanks, but they do not explode without some inflammable gas acting as fuel. There is jet fuel in the plane, but it has to be transported from the wings to the fuselage. There is air. The Committee made experiments with jet fuel – air/oxygen mixture, a type of a thermobaric charge, but it did not break the fuselage into small pieces, as was the case with the crash.
The report shows an explosion of some other thermobaric charge (maybe aluminum-air) where such a charge breaks the fuselage into small pieces and notes that such a charge does not leave easily detectable signs of explosives. At this point the report finishes without clear results. It suggests doing autopsy to the bodies, which is now being done, looking for traces of thermobaric explosives. Apparently no such traces have been found so far, but the report notes that in 2010 the Polish Central Criminal Laboratory of the Police found traces of explosives from the chairs. It would be good to know what chemicals they found.
More complete results are promised in the forthcoming final report.
So, did this Committee prove anything? In my opinion it did prove that there was an explosion 6 m above the ground. In the beginning the report argued that there was another explosion of a wing before the plane hit the birch. I cannot say if this was shown in a convincing way, but the theory is possible. The explosive causing the disintegration of the plane 6 m above the ground was not identified. Arguments that the Russian ground control was intentionally misleading the pilots were weak concerning the intentionality but not about the fact that the plane was approaching the airport in a wrong track and the ground control apparently did not tell the pilots early enough to change the course.
It all goes back to the door.
The door is the smoking gun. It proves that there was an explosion. I do not expect more from a 64 page report. I also do not know why the experts claim that there is no evidence of an explosion. Let us say that this PIS Committee is cheating in everything, but what about the photo of Russians digging up the door from the ground? Photoshopping? If so, why is it not debunked yet?
Before I read this report, I did not believe in the explosion theory, not being any pisowiec myself. So many experts claimed that they investigated it and there was no explosion. Still I kept an open mind in this issue, as in the modern time, starting from around 1750, you should not believe what is told. There is too much misinformation, manipulation and plotting. That is, there are conspiracies, false flags and all this stuff that you are not supposed to take seriously not to be labeled a crackpot. But many of those things are true. So now I think there is a strong piece of evidence. Theoretically it might be shown wrong. But I cannot think a way to push a metal door deep into the ground. One of these things.
But wait. Maybe I can think of one way. Maybe the tail, which was plowing the ground at this time, pushed the door deeply to the ground. I hope they checked this, but if not, hope they will. So, let us not be too fast. There is at least one other way how the door can be one meter under, an explosion is not necessarily the only alternative.
My final opinion of this report is therefore that it is missing an essential part. There is only one piece of evidence of an explosion which can be strong, the door. Other evidence may support the explosion theory, but can also be explained in another way. What is missing from the door analysis is discussing and discarding all other possible ways that can have pushed the door to the ground.