Safety II White Paper: Assessing Resilience and Human Variability Within Aviation Safety

As the nation's aerospace system becomes ever more complex, traditional data-driven safety approaches of addressing precursors to accidents are becoming more challenging. Safety II offers a complementary approach to the FAA's traditional safety management approaches. 

Safety II acknowledges that humans bring variability to complex sociotechnical systems, and as a result, precursors will always exist. Our nation's aerospace system is an example of a complex sociotechnical system that consists of both the daily operations of the National Airspace System (NAS), and the processes employed to design, build, certify, and maintain aerospace products. 

The FAA and other aviation stakeholders can continually improve the safety of the aerospace system by learning from all operations (i.e., asking what is working well in addition to focusing on what went wrong) and understanding how human variability is contributing to safety.