yellowbook-rail.org.ukThat much beloved safety engineering handbook of the UK rail industry, the Yellow Book, is back. The handbook has been re-released as the International Handbook Engineering Safety Management (iESM).

Re-development is being carried out by Technical Program Delivery Ltd and the original authoring team of Dr Rob Davis, Paul Cheeseman and Bruce Elliot.

As with the original this incarnation is intended to be advisory rather than mandatory, nor does it tie itself to a particular legislative regime.

Volume one of the iESM containing the key processes in 36 pages is now available free of charge from the iESM’s website, enjoy.

Occasional readers of this blog might have noticed my preoccupation with unreliable airspeed and the human factors and system design issues that attend it. So it was with some interest that I read the recent paper by Sathy Silva of MIT and Roger Nicholson of Boeing on aviation accidents involving unreliable airspeed.

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No, not the alternative name for this blog. :)

I’ve just given the post Pitch ladders and unusual attitude a solid rewrite adding some new material and looking a little more deeply at some of the underlying safety myths.

The pentagon is functioning (Image Source: USN)

….And there are still unknown, unknowns

A while ago I posted a short piece on the difference between aleatory, epistemic and ontological uncertainty, using Don Rumsfeld’s famous news conference comments as a good introduction to the subject.

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For somebody. :)

787 Lithium Battery (Image Source: JTSB)

But, we tested it? Didn’t we?

Earlier reports of the Boeing 787 lithium battery initial development indicated that Boeing engineers had conducted tests to confirm that a single cell failure would not lead to a cascading thermal runaway amongst the remaining batteries. According to these reports their tests were successful, so what went wrong?

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Well it sounded reasonable…

One of the things that’s concerned me for a while is the potentially malign narrative power of a published safety case.

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