In january the Dutch news agency brought this arctile. It stated that Kiev should have closed its airspace in May, based on 'new information' and the opninion of Nico Voorbach, former chairman of the ECA.
Nico claims that if airlines had known that air-to-air engagements were carried out over Eastern Ukraine, many airlines would have diverted outside Eastern Ukraine.
Some members of Dutch parlaiment thrive on this, and ask the dutch cabinet why the Dutch state didn't inform the airlines even after being briefed by Ukraine like previous post.
So, after Rutte stated that he wouldn't allow anybody to politically misuse the MH-17 tragedy these dutch parliament members are just doing that, over the heads of the victims.
Why?
Dutch parliament members pretend that the dutch government had both extra information on the air safety situation and obligation to share this to its national airlines. This is both not the case. There is no extra information, Ukraine invited the diplomats of 8 countries to express concern about Russian involvement. The task of evaluating of safety of airspaces for national airlines is not a task of the dutch intelligence services, who are focussed on IS. And in fact, the so-called new information was already known immediately after the downing of the different airplanes.
On the May incident, which happened in June according to ASN, there is only the mention of ground fire.
The 14th july downing of the An-26, Kiev IMMEDIATELY stated that this was either due a Russian Pantsir missile or an AIR-TO-AIR missile, and it seems that they now stick to the latter. Proof that a missile was involved was already visible on the same day (see Aviation Safety Network entry).
The downing of a SU-25 on July 16th was according to Kiev by a Russian jet.
Rebels, however, claimed that both were downed by Manpads.
That Ukraine didn't close the airspace themselves, is surely a liability, but they didn't withhold information about what was happening. We, in the West, rather wanted to believe that rebels did this by manpads than accept the deep involvement of Russian Military in this conflict, ignoring facts that showed the opposite.
So this leads to the question which I hope that the DSB will answer: why did airlines stay flying above Eastern Ukraine while they knew (or could know) that air-to-air engagements were taking place. Or do they simply follow the national NOTAMs? Because the DSB cannot interview the national intelligence agencies, it lets the intelligence commity do this for her, to get answers here.
But the worst is the way Ukraine handled the decision of closing the Eastern Ukraine airspace. Please see link below and watch the movie on the right side of the page. Military decided on the raising of the minimum altitude. But Military look different to safety than civil airlines.
link below: dutch story + piece of dutch journal, including the reaction of the Ukraine minister.
'Oekraïne had luchtruim al in mei moeten sluiten' | NOS