White Paper on Approaches to Safety Engineering

Nowadays, all industries are responsible to recognize the duty of care they owe
to their employees. Taking up all the possible measures to avoid any accidents in the
workplace is not only a moral obligation to them but also makes sound financial sense when
it comes to the employees safety. Workers go to work in the factories, construction sites or
other places of work to make out their living. They work hard and sometime even put in
extra hours of work for which they paid extra wages in the form of overtime. But no worker
would be willing to work in a place where he/she feels there is danger to his/her life. In the
early century, industries diverge to their approaches to safety engineering. They are concern
about their industrial safety and individual efforts to design safe products and systems. All
the efforts resulted in a very distinct engineering ways, mostly because the problems they
needed to solve were so different.

In commercial aircraft, the safety of everyone is settled by first identifying

the risks, hazards and threats. Aircraft maintenance must perform a fault hazard analysis to
the whole components of it. The perils are traced to the aircraft components and each is
assigned a reliability target such that the aircraft as a whole will reach the failure rate
requirements. When flying, the passengers of a commercial aircraft have many more things
to worry about then getting to their destination on time. They have to be concerned about
their personal safety because of any tendency of failures in engines or any technical
problems. Flight crews and on board computers can usually monitor most of the aircraft or
plane interior components and its engines, but routine inspections are usually performed to
inspect the aircrafts surface area and other places that aren't monitored by computers.
Several times a day the airline personnel perform a walk around checks in which they look
for leakage of fluids and problems with surface area of the aircraft. These problems include
dents and cracks. Every three to five days regarding on my research the plane's lighting,

landing gear, fluid levels, and exterior controls, and the flaps and rudders, are checked for
irregularities and problems.

Secondly, we have the nuclear power system that helps us to sustain the
daily energy needs of our society. The development of the economy and many parts of the
civilization depends on energy. The world needs more energy because the world population
is steadily increasing and is now over billions of human population. Society needs to build
more housing, schools, hospitals, transport systems, manufacturing and other
infrastructures. All of these processes of development depend on energy. If there is not
enough energy, instead of development, there will be poverty, disease and death. Nuclear
power has been used for many decades. On one side evidence shows that nuclear energy is
safe for humanity and the environment, adequate material for about millions of years,
reasonable cost and it is dangerous for human lives and the environment. Nuclear energy
has become one important kind of alternative energy.

In addition, commercial aircrafts and nuclear power plant have their own
similarity that approaches to safety. Firstly, they are both very conservative in their
approach to introducing new technology schematics and drafts. In our world today,
technology is fast emerging than we know it thats why these industries are meticulous
about the technology they are embracing. A 99% functionality and accuracy in all of
hypothesized fail-safe designs is a must. Unfortunately, there is a principle that says: There
will always be a flaw in a system. Lastly, both industries concentrate on failures of system
components as the cause of accidents. As I said earlier, theres a principle that says having
a flaw in a system is inevitable. Thats why full analytical efforts are being pushed through to
the system designs to minimize the untimely and spontaneous accidents that may happen.
Though accidents may happen unexpectedly, fail-safe system designs are always there to
remedy the situation.

On the other hand, principle of safety approach that is called the fly-fix-fly
approach to learning from experience is effective to both industries. It is a useful technique
to both industries because basic designs tends to change slowly over time and because of
their safety approaches are very reliability oriented, both industries tend to rely heavily on
redundancy. It can also involve a technique called Physical Law in which designing a system
in such a way that failure cannot be catastrophic based on failure will occur. A primary
difference on these both industries is that a nuclear power plant can rely on its overall
system shutdown as its first safety measure. It is to prevent any volatile chemical and
nuclear reactions on a site. There are emergency electrical systems used whenever the
power drawn from off-site is cut-off. There are also reactor protection system to terminate
any unwanted nuclear reactions and containment systems to prevent the release of
radioactive material into the environment. In commercial aircrafts, system shutdown is not
always an option especially when the aircraft is already in the air (fail-safes states are
different). There are safety hazards that involve aviation. The most common of these are
engine failures, fire, typhoon turbulence and pilot error. However these threats are partnered
with their countermeasures. Built-in breathing apparatuses, buoyancy jackets and proposed
seating positions during times of aircraft threat are some of the many countermeasures that
a commercial aircraft industry has.

The chemical industries are considered basic for health, industrial and
agricultural development as well as for defence. Chemical industry is not only concerned
with manufacture of pure chemicals, but also it is an industry where its raw materials are
processed into higher added value chemical products. In which it covers wide range and it
comprises the companies that produce industrial chemicals; which are necessary for day-today activities. This is because in the system converts raw materials such as oil, natural gas,
water, metals, and minerals into more than 70,000 different products. The industry creates
an immense variety of products which impinge on virtually every aspect of our lives. The
industry produces large amount of consumer products. Products of this industry are

categorized as basic chemicals, specialty chemicals, and consumer chemicals; in which, all
are important for innovation. Its main product comprises of detergents, acids, and chemical
compound which can be used for developing studies and can be on application in chemistry.
This implies that the range of this industry is wide, thus safety system is crucial. Safety
system in chemical process industry is different from the prior such that it is not government
regulated to the same extent.
Instead, the process industry requires more of plant alteration and
modification, sampling and gauging to mitigate hazards that might be encountered. The
three traditional hazards in the industry which have remained virtually unchanged in nature
include fire, explosion, and toxic release. Design and operating procedures to eliminate or
control these hazards have evolved and been incorporated into codes and standards. The
chemical industry is comparatively a new addition to the manufacturing world.
In the Defence and Military Aviations side, system safety was developing
vastly after the World War II. Their safety approaches improved and further developed the
basic concepts of system safety. Although its basic concepts predate the post-World War II
period, much of the early development system safety began immediately with the flight
engineers as a separate discipline after the war. The Air Force since then had long list of
problems with aircraft accidents. Theyve lost so many aircrafts and pilot in which theyve
blamed the pilots error on manoeuvring. However, many industry flight engineers didnt
believe the cause of lost was so simple. They pushed through safety must be designed and
internally built into the aircraft just us are the different factors of an aircraft which is:
performance, stability and structural integrity.

The Safety Flight Foundation then conducted countless seminars that

brought together different departments of aviation: engineering, operations and
management. It was headed by Jerome Lederer (who would later be the head of NASA Apollo
safety program). It was in 1954 that the term system safety may have been first used in

one of the papers of aviation safety pioneers, C.O. Miller entitled Applying Lessons Learned
from Accident Investigations to Design through a Systems Safety Concept. During this
period, we can see the rise and vast development of system safety that started from the
initiative of early flight engineers.

When the Air Force began to develop nuclear weapons such as the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, there are no more pilots to blame due to this weapons
emergence. Liquid-propellant missiles blew up often and have devastating results. System
safety itself arose from the development of these ballistic missile programs. But on these
first missile projects, system safety was not assigned as a specific responsibility. Instead,
each personnel working on the system: designer, manager and engineer was assigned
responsibility for safety. These project involved advanced technology and system complexity
than had previously attempted and the downside of the quality approach to safety became
to clear when many problems with the interface went unnoticed until the time was too late.

What is System Safety? System safety is a specialty

within system engineering that supports program risk management. It is the application of
engineering and management principles, criteria and techniques to optimize safety. In
addition, it is also an effort to make things as safe as practical systematically. Systematic
methods with a measured approach to identifying, analyzing, and controlling hazards aid in
reducing errors and improve task accomplishment through increased effectiveness and
efficiency. The goal of System Safety is to optimize safety by the identification of safety
related risks, eliminating or controlling them by design and/or procedures, based on
acceptable system safety precedence. Although system safety is a relatively new
development and still expanding, some general principles are consistent throughout its
various indications and distinguish it from other approaches to safety and risk management.
System safety affirms building in safety, not adding it on to a completed design, but also a
part of initial concept development. The rate to which it is economically suitable to eliminate
a hazard rather than to control it depends upon the stage in system development at which

the hazard is identified and considered. System safety deals with systems as a perfect one
rather than with subsystems or components. Safety is emerging the different properties of a
system, not on its component. Also, one of the principle obligation of system safety classify
and check out the interfaces between the system components and determine the effects of
component interaction, where the set of components includes humans, machines, and also
the environment. It takes a larger view of hazards than just failures. Focused about the
effects of hazards and it cause to failures. Remember that not all failures caused by hazards.
We do have different approaches when it comes to system safety, but most of the time we
always considered the fact that it diverge in protecting and preventing hazardous and risks
to us.

What is the difference between Industrial Safety and System Safety?

In industrial safety, it only focused about the primary conditions and the
avoidance in any accidents of an employees safety when he/she is assigned to their proper
workplace like factories, construction sites and so on and so ford. It is also a countermeasure
crucial in any hazardous plants such as oil and gas plants and nuclear plants. They are used
to protect human, plant, and environment in case the process goes beyond the control
margins. As the name suggests, these systems are not intended for controlling the process
itself but rather protection. Process control is performed by means of process control
systems and is interlocked by the safety systems so that immediate actions are taken should
the process control systems fail. While the system safety it uses systems theory and
systems engineering approaches to prevent foreseeable accidents and to minimize the
result of unforeseen ones. Although they have similarities, both of this may concern in
adequate manner for each and everyone.

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