The BLUF without the fluff. TL;DR:

• INCOSE SE Flash Cards – 500+ flash cards on the INCOSE SE Handbook are now available
• Drone Policy Shift – U.S. Executive Order and DoD directive spark UAV industry response.
• SysML v2 Released: Major upgrade with API and new syntax.
• Air India Flight 171 Crash: Preliminary report uncovers possible faulty fuel cut-off switch design.
• SE Blog: Topics include ant behavior, sterile fly strategy, and systems theory.

INCOSE SE Flash Cards

The 500+ INCOSE SE Handbook Flash Cards have been live since June and already there’s been great uptake. Check out https://fitzgeraldsystems.com/services/incose-se-handbook-v5-flash-cards/. Sign up to the monthly TL;DR SE Newsletter to get a limited availability promo code for 15% off.

Air India Flight 171 crash preliminary report

On June 12th, 2025 the Air India Flight 171, from Ahmedabad, India, to London Gatwick, UK, using a Boeing 787-8, crash landed 32 seconds after take off killing 241 of 242 people on board as well as killing 19 people and injuring 67 on the ground¹. As regrettable as the terrible loss of life is it was also disheartening to read that the knee jerk reaction was to blame the pilots for the crash. The Indian Aircraft Accident Investigation Board (AAIB) released a preliminary report² on 8th July which outlined that the reason Flight 171 crashed was because both engines suffered a fuel cut off almost immediately after taking off. Analysis showed that the fuel cut-off switches for both engines had switched from RUN to CUTOFF within 1 second of each other. One pilot asked the other why he had cut off the engines, to which the reply was that the other pilot did not. The pilots tried to restart the engines, succeeded to do so with one engine yet was not successful for the other but the thrust was too little too late and the plane catastrophically crashed.

The fuel cut-off switches are designed with a locking mechanism to make it ‘impossible’ for the switches to inadvertently switch – the pilot would need to pull the toggle out, move it to another position and release the toggle. Lo and behold it has been possible for the locking feature of these switches to be disabled as identified in a 2018 Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin³ which came out with a non-mandatory recommendation to check the locking feature during the pre-flight checks. The fault looks similar: “If the locking feature is disengaged, the switch can be moved between the two positions without lifting the switch during transition, and the switch would be exposed to the potential of inadvertent operation. Inadvertent operation of the switch could result in an unintended consequence, such as an in-flight engine shutdown.”.

Unleashing American Drone Dominance?

On June 6th there was an US White House Executive Order⁴ to promote the resilience of domestic UAV related technologies, capabilities and supply chains which went into hype mode early July after Secretary of Defense, Hegseth, released a directive in support of the Executive Order⁵ mid July. Since then US domestic UAV providers have been jumping on the PR wagon to showcase their wares which they might as well considering the hurdles, loops of fire and pits of doom they would need to go through to secure a DoD contract. Laughably the US Army released a now deleted X post ask their readers whether they have ever seen a UAV release a grenade, in 2025⁶. Goes to show that the US military services are still very much behind its near-peers in the low cost but effective UAV operations, something that the Secretary actually admitted but committed to ‘leapfrog’ the competition. The weakest link in the US DoD always seemed to be in its procurement arm so I think it will need a lot more than a top down directive to change the cadence, risk threshold and culture of its Procurement arm.

INCOSE IS 2025 has finished

INCOSE International Symposium (IS), marketed as the major global meeting point for practitioners in Systems Engineering, has wrapped up in Ottawa, Canada. The INCOSE IS featured keynote speakers such as Robert Thirsk, retired Canadian astronaut and saw the congregation of mostly INCOSE members to share notes and experiences in their trials and tribulations of Systems Engineering. I’m gutted to not have gone, considering it’s not far from where I live, but something caught my eye and raised my brow: online there was an attendee who openly questioned whether the field should be ‘Engineering of Systems’ rather than the current ‘Systems Engineering’ which is not surprising considering the INCOSE SE Handbook is a manual for the engineering of systems and not on Systems Engineering as a separate domain. Does the sentiment reveal a shift in perspective by INCOSE away from the application of Systems Science and Systems Thinking to the engineering of a product towards the management of the engineering effort to realize that product? That perceived shift was one of the sparks that started Fitzgerald Systems – to bring the engineering back into Systems Engineering!

SysML v2 Released

The Object Management Group have formally accepted the specification of SysML v2.0 on July 21st⁷. The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) version 2.0 is a major departure to version 1.x because it leaves the warm embrace of UML (Unified Modeling Language) to stand on its own. Two key differences to version 1.x is that the XML backend is now replaced with a custom textual notation complementing its graphical syntax; the second is that the model is now accessible by an API potentially opening the countless opportunities for 3rd party plug-ins to query and edit the systems model. In the recent INCOSE IS many tool vendors and platforms were in force to showcase their SysML v2 user interfaces.

Check out the SE Blog

In July I wrote 3 articles related in some convoluted way with Systems Engineering.

• I explored how human can leverage the behavior of ants to collaborate at a mass scale;
• I also created a Systems Dynamics model to give credence to the strategy that the way to defeat a plague of flesh eating larva is to flood the zone with sterile flies is the way;
• As well as a chapter review (Introduction) of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s book on General Systems Theory showing that his concern for the role of humans in systems still very prescient today.

You’re welcome to check it out and leave comment.

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2025, August 1). Air India Flight 171. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_171 ↩︎
2. Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau. (2025, July 8). Preliminary report: Accident involving Air India’s B787-8 aircraft bearing registration VT-ANB at Ahmedabad on 12 June 2025. Government of India, Ministry of Civil Aviation. ↩︎
3. Federal Aviation Administration. (2018, December 17). Special airworthiness information bulletin: Engine fuel and control (SAIB: NM-18-33). U.S. Department of Transportation. https://www.faa.gov ↩︎
4. Trump, D. J. (2025, June 6). Unleashing American drone dominance [Executive order]. The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/unleashing-american-drone-dominance/ ↩︎
5. Harper, J. (2025, July 10). Hegseth directive on ‘unleashing U.S. military drone dominance’ includes deadlines for major overhauls. DefenseScoop. https://defensescoop.com ↩︎
6. Brown, S. (2025, July 22). Social media mocks US Army’s ‘new weaponized drone’ video. Kyiv Post. https://www.kyivpost.com ↩︎
7. Object Management Group. (2025, July 21). Object Management Group approves final adoption of the SysML V2 specification. Object Management Group. https://www.omg.org/news/releases/pr2025/07-21-25.htm ↩︎