Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Kimberly S Wasson.
The Overarching Properties (OPs) distill the essence of the implicit properties that decades of practice have determined an aviation system or subsystem must possess to be eligible for approval by relevant authorities. This document presents the fundamentals of construction and assessment for explicit arguments that conclude a system or subsystem possesses the OPs.
This paper follows up A Primer on Argument by providing introductory information about how to assess arguments. The structure is as follows. The opening section identifies and summarizes prerequisite information a reader needs to understand to understand this document. Section 2 introduces a way (but not the only way) to assess atomic arguments. Section 3 does the same for compound arguments. Section 4 wraps everything up. Appendix A collects the crucial information in one place. Appendix B explicates a detailed assessment example. The paper is published as a white paper because it is intended to be updated as additional experience is gained with its use.
The purpose of this document is to provide a common understanding of terms, concepts, principles, and uses of argument. It emphasizes the practical over the theoretical and the simple over the complicated.
The purpose of this document is to establish for the Overarching Properties Working Group (OPWG) a common understanding of the terms, concepts, principles, and uses of argument. It emphasizes the practical over the theoretical and the simple over the complicated.
The national airspace system is exceptionally safe, specifically in terms of commercial air traffic operations. The introduction of innovative aircraft (such as electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles) undergoing novel operations (such as for an urban air passenger carrying mission) is a potential disruptor to the current means of regulating and ensuring the safety of air travel. The aviation industry and associated regulatory bodies are adapting their approaches to assuring system safety to enable these new paradigms. However, any system safety analysis requires that a hazard assessment be performed. In this work, we consider the Functional Hazard Assessment (FHA) and Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) techniques for hazard assessment and evaluate whether they can be used in a complementary fashion for regulatory approval purposes. We perform an FHA and an STPA on an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle undergoing an urban air mobility (UAM) passenger carrying reference scenario and present excerpts of this analysis. We then draw parallels between the techniques and highlight elements where they naturally reinforce to each other’s results, specifically in the consideration of hazard severity with respect to flight phases, the design of hazard mitigations, and the applicability of the results to all types of regulatory approvals (e.g., type certification, operational approval, and crew training).