SAFETY OF AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS: A CASE STUDY

An airplane is a highly engineered system incorporating control- and feedback-loops which often, and realistically, are non-linear because the equations describing such feedback contain products of state variables, trigonometric or squareroot functions, or other types of non-linear terms. This report describes the application of Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA), also know as Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA), to highly engineered systems, such as aircraft. PSA encompasses a wide variety of methods, including event tree analysis (ETA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and common cause analysis, among others.