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The SCSC publishes a range of documents:
The club publishes its newsletter Safety Systems three times a year in February, June and October. The newsletter is distributed to paid-up members and can be made available in electronic form for inclusion on corporate members' intranet sites.
The proceedings of the annual symposium, held each February since 1993, are published in book form. Since 2013 copies can be purchased from Amazon.
The club publishes the Safety-critical Systems eJournal (ISSN 2754-1118) containing high-quality, peer-reviewed articles on the subject of systems safety.
If you are interested in being an author or a reviewer please see the Call for Papers.
All publications are available to download free by current SCSC members (please log in first), recent books are available as 'print on demand' from Amazon at reasonable cost.
The club publishes its newsletter Safety Systems three times a year in February, June and October. The Newsletter is available to be read or downloaded from the website by all current Club members.
In our line of work we often come across pithy words of wisdom such as “Safety First!” and “Don’t Learn Safety by Accident!” While we might debate how impactful such expressions might be on changing behaviours, I’m sure we’d agree the sentiment is in the right place. I was therefore surprised to come across another expression recently: “Safety Third!”
It did require a bit of a doubletake; not least that safety wasn’t considered the upmost priority but wasn’t even a close runner up! It seems it really is “a thing” and you can indeed literally buy the teeshirt, so you can promote this philosophy yourself, often with images accompanied by some dangerous acts such as riding a wild bear, beer in hand, or proudly exhibiting the results of your recklessness with a couple of bloodied missing fingers.
As far as I could gather, the elements taking priority over safety are firstly, the mission itself, and secondly, the commitment and enthusiasm of those taking part. Unfortunately, the philosophy appears not to be constrained purely to the young devil-may-care thrill-seeking adventurers venturing into the woods to find bears. A poignant example is Stockton Rush and his endeavours with his deep-sea exploration company OceanGate. Rush saw safety as stifling innovation and so choose not to seek safety certification for the Titan submersible, which unfortunately imploded in June 2023 killing himself and four others. Rush was quoted as saying “… at some point, safety is just pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed … At some point, you're going to take some risk, and it really is a risk- reward question”.
Arguably, Rush’s endeavours were on one extreme of the risk-reward balance. The huge efforts being undertaken toward enabling Urban Air Mobility (UAM) – electric flying taxis to some – is arguably another unprecedented area of innovation with significant momentum. We are now seeing early flights of such vehicles, but progress towards remotely piloted or autonomous variants is still slow as much of the regulation required for true integration with crewed vehicles is still being developed and may take many years. Some businesses have already folded and others are hostages to their first accident, which would likely irrevocably damage their brand and put them out of business.
The key question (assuming we do want to get out of bed!) is where should the risk-reward balance lie and who makes that determination? Consumers ultimately perhaps, but despite signing waivers there will still be an expectation that safety is being managed – other stakeholders have a part to play and opinions can change almost overnight after a mishap. In conclusion “Safety Third” in my view is a philosophical approach that cannot be lightly dismissed and needs careful management in its own right, but how? Does a method or calculus exist for trying to quantify this precarious risk/reward balance? Views (or articles) welcome!
In this edition we have three great articles, two seminar event reports and a return of the annual SCSC Safety Systems crossword! We are also preparing for our next SCSC Symposium to be held in York in Feb 2025 so see the end pages for programme details.
Paul Hampton SCSC Newsletter Editor
paul.hampton@scsc.uk
Contents
Back in June, Wendy Owen wrote an article celebrating International Women in Engineering Day (INWED). The article was published on the SCSC website to tie in with the INWED event, which occurs on 23rd June every year. Wendy has kindly agreed to reproduce the content in this edition of the newsletter; this will help make the insights arising from her group discussion with prominent female system safety engineers available to as wide as readership as possible and ties in with Ada Lovelace Day (findingada.com) also celebrated this month.
INWED began in the UK in 2014 as a national campaign from the Women’s Engineering Society (WES). Since then, it has grown enormously, receiving UNESCO patronage in 2016 and going global the following year. INWED promotes the amazing work that women engineers across the globe are doing and gives them a profile when they are still hugely under-represented. It plays a vital role in encouraging women and girls to take up engineering careers.