The realism of FAA reliability-safety requirements and alternatives

As avionic systems become more complex, realistic qualification requirements for the flight-critical systems becomes more important, but more difficult to define. Requirements developed to establish acceptable levels of performance must be verifiable if they are to have any meaning. This article shows that both the current FAA requirements of flight-critical systems and the FAA recommended methods for probabilistic assessment are flawed, and result in "required" safety assessments which are misleading. Alternatives are then explored.