Reaction Dutch Safety Board on media reports investigation crash flight TK1951

The Dutch Safety Board does its work in strict independence. The Board decides independently on the outcome of its investigations, the content of its reports and its conclusions and recommendations.

American authorities and Boeing reacted to the concept report, which is standard procedure. In the Annex to the report their reaction and the way the Dutch Safety Board responded to their reaction is shown, in full transparency.

The report published in 2010 makes quite clear that the key-responsibility for the crash lies with Boeing, giving the failure of systems on board of the Boeing 737-800 and the way that Boeing responded to earlier warnings. Additionally, remaining possibilities for the pilots to correct these system-flaws were not used.

The technical report provided by Prof. Dekker was used by the Dutch Safety Board to substantiate its conclusions in the final report in 2010. At the time the Dutch Safety Board was not in the habit to publish underlying studies. Our current practice is different; we now publish as much as possible on our website, whenever a new report comes out. Given the current practices we have decided to publish prof. Dekker’s report today.

The key-question whether lessons of the TK1951-crash were sufficiently learned by Boeing and the American authorities, this should be part of the ongoing international investigation in the recent crashes of Boeing 737 Max.