SAFETY ASSESSMENT REPORT (SAR)


The purpose of the Safety Assessment Report (SAR) is to document a comprehensive evaluation of the risks:
  • prior to test or operation of a system,
  • prior to the next contract phase (most desired) or
  • at contract completion.

The SAR documents all safety features of the hardware, and system design and identifies procedural, hardware-related and software-related hazards that may be present in the system being acquired, including specific procedural controls and precautions that should be followed.

For small development programs or non-developmental item acquisitions, the SAR may be used as the only formal documentation of safety program activities/hazard assessment.  In this case, inexperienced safety engineers often have difficulty deciding if the SAR content is sufficient.

Naturally, the SAR (MIL-STD-882E Task 301) is not to be confused with the System Safety Assessment (SSA) a la SAE ARP4761 - this is intuitively obvious.

The SAR and the safety case (or safety assurance case) are close cousins: not identical - similar, with the SAR being much less intensive.

Scroll down for crucial information.

HCRQ has been producing SARs since the days of MIL-STD-882B. ​
  • We develop very good SARs and have never received customer or end customer comments that required us to modify them. 
  • We have reviewed hundreds of SARs. 
  • We are frequently asked by end customers what they should watch out for in SARs.  There have been times when they have confidentially revealed portions of SARs and asked us for our professional opinion (for example off to the side at our courses).
  • What is important, from a legal perspective, to include?  After all it is one of the 3 system safety documents that is normally the focus of plaintiffs.  Got your curiosity up?

One of the SARs we developed was for DJM for their Scorpion SEID-17 and SEID-20 run flat extraction and insertion systems.  Their customer was the USMC.  Another was for Data Transformation Corporation for the Direct User Access Terminal (DUAT).  Their customer is FAA.  Yet another was for IMS-EMS for the De-Icing System of the Watchkeeper Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (WK450 UAV).  Their customer was Elbit Systems.  There have been many, many others.


If you are interested, attend our SAR Webinar - it is definitely more insightful than you will find elsewhere. 

There is much more to SARs than is shown in the familiar DIDs (DI-SAFT-80102B or FAA-DI-SAFT-107).  We can provide you a list of what is missing (hmmm, some pretty important things).