Challenging the 'Safety Sausage Machine'

As military systems become increasingly complex, so does the requirement to argue acceptable levels of safety. Many long-established design standards favour mitigating safety risk by design, and view mitigation by procedure of lesser value.
However, recent experience has shown that this 'design everything in' philosophy can remove flexibility - some military users regularly mitigate risk through a combination of procedure and design, and are generally happy to accept more risk to gain the flexibility that this brings.
A natural tension therefore exists between the ‘classical’ approach of designing in safety, and an alternative approach that adjusts the design/procedural split to gain operational flexibility.

Paul Chinneck is an experienced safety engineer with over 15 years experience, specialising mainly in the aerospace domain. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Member of the Royal Aeronautical Society and a Certified Safety Professional. Paul acts as Technical Authority for an Altran UK unmanned systems project, providing technical direction to assure the integrity of the safety output. Paul is also responsible for the generation of electronic Safety Cases, and regularly provides safety advice and support to prime contractors and customers.