Dick Perry

I’m Dick Perry with the Airworthiness Assurance Department, Transportation Surety Center at Sandia National Laboratories.

My subject today is aviation surety, which at Sandia focuses primarily on the air transportation system. We have the safest air transportation system in the world here in the United States. It was developed on surety concepts that are relatively basic. We design systems to work as they’re intended. We put some reliability into those systems so that when they do fail we have the opportunity for human intervention–the professional flight crews, maintenance crews, and air traffic controllers intervene in the system and return it to a safe condition before a catastrophe occurs.

Human intervention is the focus of most of the surety aspects that have gotten us to this point. The exception is in structural areas, where we have gone to the third level of surety. We design the structures of our aircraft so that any failure of a single component due to physical damage, corrosion, fatigue, cracking from stress or other failures will not result in a catastrophic failure of the structure. Nor will it require any intervention on the part of the pilots. In fact, we can live with those failed components for a significant amount of time until we get to the eventual human intervention of inspection processes that identify the failure and then restore the aircraft to its original level 3 condition.

Yet despite having the safest system in the world we still have accidents and that’s a concern as a high consequence operation. We’ve been challenged by the President’s Security on Aviation Security and Safety to achieve an 80 percent reduction in the accident rate over a ten-year period for commercial operations fatal accidents. In doing that Sandia has been working primarily with a Federal Aviation Administration and also with the Department of Defense in improving aviation surety, in all three aspects of surety–security, safety, and reliability.

In the security area our activities in securing nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor facilities are directly applicable to aviation facilities, airports and other high value facilities. We have an example very close to here. Baltimore/Washington International Airport was a subject of one our security surveys. We’ve made recommendations to improve not only the physical security but the procedures that have already been incorporated there and are being designed into a modification to the terminal.

In safety we’ve been working directly with the flight standards service to move away from the basic levels of safety assessment that have been associated with establishing regulations and then insuring through inspection processes that the air carriers comply with those regulations and then correcting deviations when they occur.

In a larger view, a systems approach allows the flight standard service to look at the systems that are in place at the carrier and to focus their inspection on the highest risk areas. When we see deviations we will not be content finding the change that is necessary to solve that one problem, but to change the system.

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