HALF OF KNKT'S RECOMMENDATIONS ON TRANSPORTATION SAFETY IGNORED

Jakarta, Dec 30 (ANTARA) - About 50 percent of recommendations made by the National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) to improve land, sea and air travel safety have remained unheeded by regulators or operators, the committee's chief said.

"So, the degree of compliance with our recommendations presented after each transportation tragedy is still low, and this means the threat of potential accidents in the transportation sector remains high," KNKT Chairman Tatang Kurniadi said at a year-end press conference here Wednesday.

Therefore, he said, the government should immediately realize a proposal for the creation of a government-KNKT team tasked with monitoring the implementation of KNKT's safety improvement recommendations.

"In the air transportation sector, there is already an ICAO (International Civil Air Travel Organization) directive that such a monitoring team should be in place by March 2010," he said.

Non-compliance with KNKT recommendations was evident from the fact that transportation accidents continued to happen because of the same mistakes or oversights, such as overloading of boats in sea transportation.

Over the past three years, the KNKT had investigated a total of 145 transportation accidents with the following break-down : 76 involving aircraft, 16 involving boats or ships, 23 involving land or motor vehicles and 30 involving trains.

In 2009, the committee investigated a total of 47 deadly transportation accidents, namely 26 air crashes, four shipwrecks, 9 road traffic accidents, and 8 train collisions or derailments.

A total of 207 people died in the tragedies, namely 38 in the air crashes, 58 in the shipwrecks, 105 in the road traffic accidents and 6 in the train accidents. Some 338 people went missing, all in the shipwrecks.
Tatang also said the KNKT was constrained in its work by the limited number of investigators it could employ. At present it had 29 investigators for aircraft, 14 for trains, 8 for boats or ships and 2 for land or motor vehicles.

"All of them are volunteers so it is difficult to ask them to work optimally. For aircraft we have 29 investigators on our list but only 4 or 5 of them are active," he said.

The shortage of investigators was the main reason that it was taking a relatively long time for the KNKT to come up with its official report on a transportation accident.