Boeing North American (BNA) System Safety engineers are often required to investigate and support in the resolution of an In-Flight Anomaly (IFA) in a short period. An in-flight anomaly is an abnormal event that occurs during Shuttle flight. For safety reasons, the IFA needs to be understood and resolved prior to the next flight of a similar hardware on the Shuttle. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is a rigorous and systematic tool for trouble-shooting an undesired event such as an IFA. FTA analyzes all critical events in a logical systematic method, and is displayed in an easy-to-understand diagrammatic model. The FTA modeling process beginswith identifying the top level undesired event. System Safety engineers then coordinate with different engineering disciplines to brainstorm the issue, and perform detailed technical analysis to determine all failure events (using a top-down approach) leading to the top undesired event. The same technique is used to expand different levels of the fault tree to determine all the lower level logical failure paths. The basic failure events (bottom events), either at the system level or at the component level, are established when all the lowest level potential anomalous events are determined.
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