Filling the FAA guidance and policy gap for systems integration and safety assurance

In 2010 the FAA formed the Airborne Systems Advisory Team (ASAT). The team consists of airborne system and safely specialists from FAA Headquarters, Directorates, and Aircraft Certification Offices (ACO). Our goal is to provide an efficient and standardized approach for establishing aircraft systems integration and safety assurance for the implementation of emerging technologies and the FAA NextGen operating environment. Current airborne systems designs have become increasingly dependent on highly integrated systems architectures that share power, computing, networking, and input/output resources to support the needs for multiple aircraft functions. Establishing the relationships and transition points between the development, verification and validation activities for these functions throughout systems integration have become more difficult to define and trace to established safety objectives. The ASAT identified SAE, ARP4754a, Development of Civil Aircraft and Systems as an acceptable method for constructing the regulatory compliance for highly-integrated or complex aircraft systems. Therefore, we published an Advisory Circular (AC) to formally recognize the methodology provided by the ARP and its part in demonstrating an acceptable means of compliance to the Title 14 CFR. In the paper we will look at an actual incident and its casual factors to illustrate the challenges we face when we integrate systems and how important it is to thoroughly analyze and test that the safety objectives established for aircraft and system level functions are compliant with the applicable Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations (14CFR). We will identify the regulatory requirement for safety in installations of systems and equipment and look at how our current policy and guidance applies to this challenge and what new policy and guidance may be needed.