The BLUF without the fluff:

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lands on the Moon

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost spacecraft successfully lands in Mare Crisium in the NE quadrant of the Near Side of the moon on March 2nd, 2025 after 45 days in transition from Earth. The mission is part of the overall NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative not only delivering 10 science and tech demonstration payloads but also improving the technological readiness of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost module. Source.

Value Engineering Guidebook released by US DoD

Value Engineering (VE) is a systematic method used by DoD to enhance the value of programs, projects, systems, etc by evaluating their functions to optimize the cost-to-function ratio. The goal of the guidebook, released February 2025, is to achieve the lowest life cycle cost whilst maintaining the required performance, reliability, quality, and safety. Source.

Recent US Flight Control Safety Incidents

The forced go around of a Southwest flight at the Chicago Midway Int. Airport on Tuesday February 25th because of a Flexjet taxiing across the intended runway got a lot of interest recently. On the following day, Jennifer Homendy, Chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), emphasized that the near-miss incident at Chicago was due to the Flexjet crew’s failure to follow air traffic control instructions. She reassured the public that air travel remains the safest mode of transportation despite recent aviation incidents. This is a good example where humans in the loop within a system of system worked as intended to compensate for a failure of one system, which you can never design out regardless how much technology we throw at the problem. Source.

Teaching a new way to prevent failures

System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) as a new paradigm on how to examine a system caught my attention 12 months ago and it’s in the pipeline of a series of articles that I will write on later in the year. If you’re not familiar with STPA here’s the 30,000 ft view: STPA is a method that uses system and control theory to model control-feedback loops in complex systems, identifying unsafe states and preventing outages by analyzing control actions and their effects on the system’s safety. Garrett Holthaus, Technical Writer at Site Reliability Engineering at Google wrote a great article on teaching this new approach. Source.

Midair Collision PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 Airplane and Sikorsky UH-60 Military Helicopter

The tragic midair collision that occurred on January 29th, 2025, over the Potomac River is (still) under investigation by National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Chairman Homendy (same as above) was clear that the NTSB wasn’t going to get involved in speculation but she did share some leads that they are pursuing: difference between radio altitude, barometric altitude and pressure altitude; possibly restricted visibility caused by the helicopter likely wearing night googles; helicopter pilot ‘stepped’ on the mic whilst air traffic control (ATC) commanded the helicopter to “pass behind”. Source.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): Why It Matters and How to Make It Work

I wrote an article on the virtues and vices of DEI largely in response to the baseless and pre-mature accusations that were made immediately after the Jan 29th crash claiming that the cause of the crash was somehow related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives of Air Traffic Control. In the article I argue that holistically applied DEI actually increases the collective awareness and understanding of an organization which is to be encouraged, not disparaged. Source.

Plug 

1. The first cohort on the INCOSE SE Handbook v5 just finished. 
2. Registration for the next study group is open – starting March 24th for 1 session per week instead of 2. 
3. Registration is open for a SysML training course – tailored for people who want to take the OCSMP Model User and Model Builder Fundamental exam. 
4. Check out the SE Blog on FitzgeraldSystems.com for in-depth articles on SE. 
5. Join me on Bluesky: @fitzgeraldsystems.bsky.social

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