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This technical paper and presentation addresses the need for more refined, pervasive and highly engaged technical leadership in the system safety discipline. Systems engineering disciplines have been led to believe that by following a single industry standard, generic plans, inflexible processes, proven methods and techniques a system with low safety risk will evolve with little rework. The truth is there is no prescriptive one size fits all approach, or a convention that will anticipate and cover all needs. In several domain areas, especially modern military and commercial airborne systems, diverse technology and functionality have been evolving with such high complexity and criticality that collective processes will not work unless seasoned leaders allow creativity and innovation to be part of the safety culture. Leaders must have intuitive engineering and operations judgment to determine how to best allocate effective resources to meet system safety goals and objectives.

The purpose of this technical paper and associated SAE panel discussion is to present an overview of software safety and technical integrity needs for “new” aircraft and software intensive systems development. Most of the software safety and integrity concepts presented are already proven and accepted in the commercial aircraft domain and are becoming more widely accepted for military tactical and strategic airlift aircraft. Even newer fighter/attack systems now accept the need for safety-critical functions list and more software safety focus. The focus is on effective, efficient, and essential software safety processes and modern methodologies to ensure safety-critical functions, either commanded, controlled or monitored by software, are prevented from contributing to Catastrophic and Hazardous failure conditions and resultant hazards.