Safety assurance in NextGen and complex transportation systems

The methods currently used to assure the safety of planned changes to our air transportation systems were developed 50 years ago for systems composed primarily of hardware components and of much less complexity than the systems we are building today. These methods are not powerful enough to handle the complex, human and software intensive systems being planned and introduced today. This paper describes an alternative and demonstrates it on a new NextGen procedure to allow more flight level changes over oceanic and other regions with limited radar coverage. The new approach and results are compared with the results obtained by the more traditional methods being used for NextGen.