Where FHA and FTA sit in safety engineering Functional Hazard Assessment (FHA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) are two of the main tools used in aviation safety engineering. But they’re not standalone tasks—you don’t just “do an FHA” or “do an FTA” in isolation. They’re part of a bigger process that helps you understand how […]
Safety cases don’t usually fail where people expect When people hear “safety case failure,” they tend to picture something pretty straightforward. A missing requirement An incorrect assumption A bad calculation A hazard that was overlooked And to be fair, those things do happen. But if you’ve spent any real time around complex systems, you start
Lion Air Flight 610 is the accident that exposed a fundamental systems engineering failure in one of the world’s most commercially critical aircraft programs. The Boeing 737 MAX MCAS — Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System — was a flight control system installed to address a handling characteristic of the re-engined 737, designed to activate when the
Air France 447 is the defining 21st-century case study in automation dependency and the degradation of manual flying proficiency. When the aircraft’s pitot tubes iced over simultaneously and the airspeed indications became unreliable, the autopilot and autothrust disconnected — exactly as designed. The crew was returned control of a perfectly serviceable aircraft at cruise altitude
A Shift in How We Think About Accidents If you go back and look at older aviation accidents, they’re usually quite straightforward to categorise. Engine failure Structural failure Fuel starvation Control surface issues There’s typically a clear starting point. Something breaks, and that failure drives everything that follows. But when you start looking at more
