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Abstract
System safety was conceptualized by the aerospace industry in the late 1940s in the United
States (U.S.). Traditionally, users of system safety applied analysis to identify operational
hazards and subsequently provide countermeasures before or after an accident.
Unfortunately, very few aviation safety researches from the airlines had utilized it to promote
aviation safety. To enrich this knowledge and contribute interest from academia, this paper
adopted the inductive techniques of system safety in analyzing airline accidents and
recommending a countermeasure. The authors reviewed 189 final accident reports from the
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) covering FAR Part 121 scheduled operations
(dated between January 1999 and May 2004). The findings revealed ten (10) accident causes
(direct hazards), namely Flight Operations, Ground Crew, Turbulence, Maintenance, Foreign
Object Damage (FOD), Flight Attendant, Air Traffic Control, Manufacturer, Passenger, and
the Federal Aviation Administration. A block-diagram model using a Fault Tree Analysis
(FTA), a leading tool for system safety experts, was created followed by probability
simulation of accidents, five (5) case studies and FTA reports aiming to demonstrate the
usefulness of system safety techniques in promoting airline safety.