Explanation of Vote on Senate Bill No. 1077
Creating a National Transportation Safety Board

Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph G. Recto

This bill, like our traffic-delayed planes and buses, may have been late in coming. But the alternative of it not arriving at all would have been the greatest tragedy.

The time to organize our own National Transportation Safety Board was actually yesterday.

The sheer volume alone of people who travel by bus, train, ship and air augurs for an investigative body that will probe the causes when something tragic happens in their journey.

And in this land, such occurrences are not rare. Buses fall off ravines and crash into each other with alarming frequency.

Capsized boats are part of the seascape. In this archipelago, ships flounder and sink. We also have our share of plane crashes, but thankfully the death toll is not high.

But the role of the NTSB is not limited to consummated accidents. Those that nearly happen deserve to be examined, because near misses should be plumbed for lessons so these aborted mishaps won’t happen again.

If bodies of the dead are autopsied, all the more that the carnage caused by accidents must be dissected for their causes—with one ultimate objective which has been the mantra of accident investigators everywhere: to find out why it happened so it will not happen again.

Our planes, and cars, and ships have become safer through the years because lessons of past mishaps were incorporated into their new designs and written into the manuals of their operation and maintenance.

We need a body like the NTSB to show us why accidents happen and how can they be prevented.

It will show us a clear picture of events leading to the accident, a second-by-second countdown of what went wrong.

We need the NTSB to piece together these fragmentary facts into a cautionary tale so that those who perished from these accidents did not fully die in vain.

I vote ‘yes’ to this measure.