The opinions that I express in this paper are based on a thorough review that I conducted of industry standards and procedures for risk management, FMEA techniques, and FMEA applications in aviation and other industries. I also base these opinions on my 25 years of experience in transportation management and analysis, airline flight operations, safety investigation management, safety research, ...

In the process of a research project to evaluate accident models, I looked in detail at a variety of spacecraft and aircraft accidents that in some way involved software [8]. The accidents studied all demonstrated the usual cultural, organizational, and communications problems such as complacency, diffusion of or lack of responsibility and authority for safety, low-level status and inappropriat...

Triamterene, a diuretic drug used in combination with other drugs for the treatment of hypertension, was found in the blood and urine of a fatal aircraft accident victim. The extraction and identification of triamterene is difficult. It exhibits poor extraction efficiency using some standard base-extraction procedures, and the parent drug is unsuitable for analysis using gas chromatography. In ...

A prelJminary formalization of the proce that night crew. use to initiate. monitor. prioriliz • ex cur ,and terminate. multiple, concurrent task i pr ent . 1 defrne key terminology and present a preliminary. normative theory of cockpit task manag ment (CTM). An error taxonomy that i applied t th ree Nat ional Transportation Safety B ard (NTSB) aircraft accident reports' introduced. Recommendati...

On Dec.12, 1985, a military charter DC-8 crashed shortly after takeoff at Gander, Nfld., Canada. All 256 aboard were killed, making this the deadliest U.S. military aircraft accident in history. The investigation team (consisting of forensic pathologists, odontologists, radiologists, anthropologists, graves registration personnel, and systems engineers) succeeded in identifying the remains of a...

Software is the primary determinant of function in many modern engineered systems, from domestic goods such as washing machines through mass-market products such as cars to civil aircraft and nuclear power plant. In a growing number of cases the software is safety critical or safety related, i.e. failure or malfunction could give rise to, or contribute to, a fatal accident. In general, where so...