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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">Overview</h2>
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<h2>7.1.1 Overview of Unit 7</h2>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="/assets/courseware/v1/d6bde12c9452129fd6d9695d9de1564a/asset-v1:MITx+16.00x+2T2019+type@asset+block/Miracle_Hudson_640.jpg" alt="US Airways Flight 1549 making an emergency landing in New York's Hudson River on January 15, 2009 after bird ingestion caused both engines to fail" type="saveimage" target="[object Object]" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em><span>US Airways Flight 1549 making an emergency landing in New York's Hudson River on January 15, 2009 after bird ingestion caused both engines to fail (Image credit: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plane_crash_into_Hudson_River_(crop).jpg">Greg L</a> via Wikimedia Commons)</span></em></p>
<p>Safety is a critical aspect of all fields of engineering. For aerospace engineering in particular, safety is of the utmost importance because it directly impacts people's lives. However, engineering systems of the modern day are increasingly complex, often involving numerous components, countless lines of software, globally-distributed design teams, and challenging operational environments. As such, it has become more and more difficult to ensure the safety of these complex systems.</p>
<p>Our discussion on system safety is presented as a conversation between Prof. Hoffman and a special guest, Dr. John Thomas. Dr. Thomas is a research engineer in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and an expert on system safety, particularly in the areas of software and embedded systems. As we will in Sections 7.2 to 7.4, safety is a system property that is dependent on many elements: hardware, software, human behavior, the context in which the system operates, as well as interactions between all of these factors. In Section 7.5, Prof. Hoffman will extend the system safety discussion to an aerospace engineering topic that receives a lot of public attention: the investigation of aircraft accidents.</p>
<p>After finishing Unit 7, students are expected to be able to:</p>
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<li>MO 7.1: Describe the traditional approach to component reliability and explain the difference between "reliability" and "safety"</li>
<li>MO 7.2: Discuss the role of software in system safety and explain why component-based reliability analysis is inadequate for managing software risks</li>
<li>MO 7.3: Discuss the role of humans in system safety and explain the importance of human interactions with hardware and software systems</li>
<li>MO 7.4: Explain the differences between the "traditional view" and the "systems view" of human factors</li>
<li>MO 7.5: Describe how accident investigators apply deductive reasoning to determine the cause(s) of an accident</li>
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