Advocating System Safety Concept in Preventing Airline Accidents

System safety was conceptualized by the aerospace industry in the late 1940s in the United States (U.S.). Traditionally, users of system safety applied analysis to identify operational hazards and subsequently provide countermeasures before or after an accident. Unfortunately, very few aviation safety researches from the airlines had utilized it to promote aviation safety. To enrich this knowledge and contribute interest from academia, this paper adopted the inductive techniques of system safety in analyzing airline accidents and recommending a countermeasure. The authors reviewed 189 final accident reports from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) covering FAR Part 121 scheduled operations (dated between January 1999 and May 2004). The findings revealed ten (10) accident causes (direct hazards), namely Flight Operations, Ground Crew, Turbulence, Maintenance, Foreign Object Damage (FOD), Flight Attendant, Air Traffic Control, Manufacturer, Passenger, and the Federal Aviation Administration. A block-diagram model using a Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), a leading tool for system safety experts, was created followed by probability simulation of accidents, five (5) case studies and FTA reports aiming to demonstrate the usefulness of system safety techniques in promoting airline safety.