Authority
SAE
Applicability
Safety assessment of civil aircraft, systems and equipment across aircraft categories, including functional-hazard and system-safety assessment activities.
Status
Current SAE revision
Plain-English Explainer
ARP4761A is SAE's current guidance for conducting aircraft and system safety assessments. SAE describes it as applicable across civil-aircraft certification contexts including Parts 23, 25, 27, 29 and engine/propeller frameworks.
The process supports activities such as aircraft and system functional hazard assessments and preliminary/final safety assessments, helping engineers identify failure conditions, establish safety objectives and assess whether system architectures satisfy them.
Distributed propulsion, high-voltage energy storage and highly integrated flight-control architectures create new combinations of common-cause, cascading and functional hazards. A disciplined aircraft-level safety process is therefore central to the certification case.
