[SystemSafety] Children as a causal factor in major accidents

Thu Oct 2 15:17:02 CEST 2014

I always like the airline safety briefing that says with regards to oxygen 
masks  "if you have more than one child with you, decide which one you 
love the most....."

On a more serious note, I have also noticed that following incidents (a 
few years ago when they were deployed "in anger" and there were comments 
from the passengers) the safety briefing now states "the bag may not 
inflate"

Cheers

Peter

Peter Sheppard
Senior Safety Engineer and Validator

Mobile: +44 7920 247931

Please consider the environment before you print / Merci de penser à 
l'environnement avant d'imprimer / Bitte denken Sie an die Umwelt bevor 
Sie drucken 

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Roberto Bagnara <bagnara at cs.unipr.it>
Sent by: systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
02/10/2014 12:59

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systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
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Subject
Re: [SystemSafety] Children as a causal factor in major accidents

On 01/10/2014 16:06, DREW Rae wrote:
> Reporting back to the list because a lot of the ideas were sent directly 
to me. Thank you to Peter, John, Patrick, Philip, Mike, Brian, and Alan.
> 
> The replies covered a what seems to be an interesting space:
> 
>   *
> 
>     Child is particularly vulnerable because of their size and body 
mass. This is important in analysing the effects of exposure, but also 
with drug safety, medical devices, poisons, and aggressive animals.
> 
>   *
> 
>     Child is incompatible with personal safety protection provided for 
adults (seat belts on cars, lap belts on planes, life jackets, air bags). 
Using the adult safety equipment may be more dangerous than no equipment, 
with the added concern of providing something appropriate and accessible 
for children.
> 
>   *
> 
>     Child equipment incompatible with the system (child leashes stuck in 
elevator doors, strollers/prams stuck on railway crossings)
> 
>   *
> 
>     Child security incompatible with safety, or system security 
incompatible with child safety (mostly involving children locking 
themselves into spaces or locking adults out of spaces)
> 
>   *
> 
>     Child incompatible with system safety protection (unable to read 
warnings, unable to activate alarms, unable to recognise "obvious" danger 
because it doesn't look dangerous)
> 
>   *
> 
>     Child as a special case of misuse, because unaware of the 
consequences of their actions (misuse of alarms, fiddling with controls, 
disabling autopilot, releasing handbrake)
> 
>   *
> 
>     Child unable to report danger to themselves or others (secondary 
drowning, leaving system in an unsafe state)
> 
> 
> Fortunately from a safety point of view, only one major accident 
(Aeroflot 583) was mentioned. I suspect I might find something more once I 
look at these specific issues.
> 
> Have I/we missed anything important? Is anyone interested in 
collaborating to take this a bit further? I think there'd be something 
interesting to say by looking at this through a few of the major safety 
models. All of those issues could be characterised as child-induced 
control loop failures. Children have different mental models, different 
capacity for control, different feedback etc. They could also be a scope 
issue for safety cases. "Have you thought about children" could undercut 
various types of evidence and argument. Even in a simple barrier model 
children could distort the effectiveness and side-effects of barriers.

I am not sure whether this is covered by the above, but children may
induce counterproductive behavior in adults.  This is the reason
on planes they always give the message that an adult should put on
the oxygen mask before helping children.  I think this generalize
to many other situations whereby a perfectly understandable
"the children first" impulse may harm the adults *and* the children.
Kind regards,

   Roberto Bagnara

> On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 9:43 AM, DREW Rae <d.rae at griffith.edu.au <
mailto:d.rae at griffith.edu.au>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi folks,
>     I've had an interesting request for a DisasterCast episode focussing 
on children and major accidents.
> 
>     1) Can anyone suggest a major accident where the presence or 
behavior of children have been a causal factor? I'm looking specifically 
for where they increased or determined the likelihood of the accident, not 
just accidents with large numbers of children.
> 
>     2) Can anyone suggest (in public-domain terms) ways children have 
had to be treated as a special case in safety analysis?
>     Off the top of my head I can think of children as a special group in 
population dose-response modelling for chemical releases, and the debate 
about child restraints in aircraft.
> 
>     [Didn't want to send a separate email to the whole list, but a 
public thank you to John and Nancy for help with my last request re 
Columbia].
> 
>     Drew
> 
>     My safety podcast: disastercast.co.uk <http://disastercast.co.uk>
>     My mobile (until October 2nd): +44 7783 446 814
>     My mobile (from October 6th): 0450 161 361
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> The System Safety Mailing List
> systemsafety at TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE
> 

-- 
     Prof. Roberto Bagnara

Applied Formal Methods Laboratory - University of Parma, Italy
mailto:bagnara at cs.unipr.it
                              BUGSENG srl - http://bugseng.com
                              mailto:roberto.bagnara at bugseng.com
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