Dutch Safety Board

Dutch Safety Board   (Crash investigation unit)
Formation	2005
Headquarters	The Hague, Netherlands
Interests	MH17, (Bijlmer disaster, airline crash investigation, Netherlands, psy-ops
Membership	•  Jeroen Dijsselbloem •  Pieter van Vollenhoven •  Tjibbe Joustra •  Marjolein van Asselt •  Stavros Zouridis •  Pieter Bindt •  Pauline Meurs •  Ronald Prins •  Ad Rutten •  Hans van der Vlist •  Bernard Welten •  Carol Verheij •  Erwin Medendorp •  Barry Velders

The Dutch Safety Board (DSB(Dutch: Onderzoeksraad Voor Veiligheid) is an Dutch nominally independent organisation with responsibility to investigate accidents and incidents in any conceivable field.

History

The formation of the DSB occurred after the Enschede fireworks disaster and the Volendam café fire. The DSB was formed in 2005 by a merger between the defence and public transportation safety boards. It replaced the Dutch Transport Safety Board, which again was a merger a few years earlier with the Netherlands Aviation Safety Board.

As of 2012 the DSB actively investigates accidents and incidents related to aviation, construction and services, crisis management and aid provision, defence, human and animal health care, industry and networks, pipelines, rail transport, shipping, as well as water. The DSB has the authorisation to investigate accidents and incidents in any conceivable field.

Bijmer Disaster

Full article: Bijmer Disaster

After the 1992 Bijmer disaster, where an El Al flight loaded with chemical weapons crashed into a residential complex, killing 42, there were numerous questions the Safety Board couldn't answer or failed to ask.

A workgroup of silenced citizens recited dozens of instances where footage was sent to the Dutch Air Safety Board but was never heard from or lost in transit. Multiple police officers that had seen the plane from other states were never questioned and multiple instances of picked up plane debris from unknown locations that couldn't be explained by the flight data was never requested. Domestic and military security air-command deleted all radar-footage from the evening of the crash.

2009 Boeing 737 investigation

While investigating the Turkish Airlines plane crash near Schiphol in 2009, the Dutch Safety Board was pressured by Americans to downplay the role design errors in the Boeing 737 NG played in the crash, similar to a string of incidents 10 years later with the Boeing 737 MAX planes.

Comments from American parties, including Boeing and the American aviation authority FAA, resulted in the Dutch Safety Board largely omitting a study by professor Sidney Dekker from the official report. Dekker, a specialist in human actions in disasters and previously a part-time pilot on the Boeing 737, was asked by the Safety Board to investigate the human factors in the crash. In his study, Dekker accused Boeing of deflecting attention from its own "design shortcomings" and other mistakes with "hardly credible" statements that admonished pilots to be more vigilant, according to the newspaper. Only around one page of Dekker's 90-page long final report made it into the Dutch Safety Board's report.

The Dutch Safety Board report mainly blamed the pilots for the crash.

In a written response to broadcaster NOS, the Dutch Safety Board said that investigations into aircraft accidents are done on the basis of international agreements and that involved parties being granted access to the investigation is part of this. The Dutch Safety board also added statements written by the Americans to its report, the newspaper wrote. These statements said that some pilot errors had not been "properly emphasized".

MH17

Full article: MH17

Similar patterns can be seen in the MH17 investigation. In a case with enormous geopolitical pressure, the DSB followed the NATO/Dutch government line, and supported the coup government the Dutch government had participated in installing.

Ukrainian authorities delegated the investigation to the DSB supposedly because of the large number of Dutch passengers and the fact that the flight originated in Amsterdam.

The evidence collected in Ukraine by the joint investigation team is first screened by the new Ukrainian government, one of the main suspects in the case.

The Malaysian government was kept out of the investigation, and only sparingly let in later.

Witnesses that didn't fit in, were never questioned. Despite a dramatic press conference/ six years later half the plane is lying on the scene of the crash.

Ukrainian statements, that all their military radars were nonoperational on that exact day, that none of their anti-aircraft batteries were in the fighting area, and that no combat planes were flying in the area, was taken at face value.

A propaganda offensive with dubious images gathered from social media and whitewashed as solid evidence by outfits like Bellingcat, itself financed by the Dutch, were part of the DSB-case. Doctored audio-tapes were part of this.

Evidence from Russia was dismissed, the radar images "were in the wrong format". U.S. Satellite images, that secretary of state John Kerry declared he was in possession of, was never presented to the DSB, or at least not put out for scrutiny.

The list goes on.

Areas of investigations

Operational sectors of investigations include:

• Aviation (commercial, passenger and private aviation)
• Shipping (inland navigation and some segments of recreational navigation)
• Rail transport (railways and increasingly also tram, metro and light rail)
• Road transport (due to the high number of accidents, only thematic investigations)
• Pipelines (pipelines, public utilities included)
• Defence (military aviation, navigation, road transport, underground infrastructure)
• Industry and trade (heavy industry (especially process industry, labour accidents))
• Crisis management and aid provision (performance of aid and control services)
• Healthcare (human and animal)
• Nature and environment (impact of aviation, marine operations, railroad and transportation)

Structure

The board acts as an autonomous organisation. Its code of conduct is established by law.

The organisation consists of a Board and a Bureau. The Board has five permanent members, the Bureau fulfills executive tasks.

People

The first DSB Chairman was Pieter van Vollenhoven, who served from 2005 until 2011. He was succeeded by Tjibbe Joustra, who retired in 2019; he was succeeded by former Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem.

 

A Document by Dutch Safety Board

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
File:Report-mh17-crash-en.pdf	report	13 October 2013	Malaysia Airlines Flight 17	Dutch Safety Board report into the MH17 disaster

 

Documents sourced from Dutch Safety Board

Title	Type	Subject(s)	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
File:MH17 preliminary report.pdf	report	Malaysia Airlines Flight 17	9 September 2014	Dutch Safety Board staff	The preliminary report by the Dutch Safety Board into the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on 17 July 2014
File:Report-mh17-crash-en.pdf	report	Malaysia Airlines Flight 17	13 October 2013	Dutch Safety Board	Dutch Safety Board report into the MH17 disaster

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