When a plane crashes, it makes headlines. That hundreds of thousands of flights each week do not crash is accepted as routine. Airliners, air traffic control systems, railway signalling, car braking systems, defence systems, nuclear power stations and medical equipment (increasingly including home medical electronics) are some of the complex, normally digital, systems in use, on which life and property depend. That these safety-critical systems do work well is because of the expertise and diligence of professional systems safety engineers, regulators and other practitioners who work to minimise both the likelihood that accidents will occur, and the consequences of those that do. Their efforts prevent untold deaths every year. The Safety-Critical Systems Club (SCSC) has been actively engaged for more than twenty years to help to ensure that this continues to be the case.
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