Evaluations on adequacy and utility of failure modes and effects and criticality analysis and fault tree analysis methodologies applied to civil RPAS systems

Abstract

This paper is on the Failure Modes and Effects and Criticality Analysis and Fault Tree Analysis methodologies applied to the equipment and functional subsystems of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS). Such aerial vehicles have been used almost exclusively for military purposes until the first decade of the 2000s. The debate then was focused both on technical and regulatory issues and research activities. Thanks to this renewed interest on unmanned systems and thanks to relatively recent improvements in information science, telecommunication, electronics and material science a strong awareness on the potential extension of unmanned technologies to civil applications arose up. A variety of economic benefits has been recognized by the aviation community from the civil use of RPAS, but, due to the absence of the pilot on board both military and civilian RPAS have always been relegated to fly into segregated airspaces. Technical potentialities of RPAS will be fully exploited integrating them into controlled airspaces in a reliable and safe way. This paper shows an example of application of FMECA and FTA to RPAS and discuss the most critical issues related to the performed analyses as well as possible future developments of this work.